Paul Hurt on Seamus Heaney's 'The Grauballe Man' and other poems

Digging (Death of a Naturalist)
Death of a Naturalist (Death of a Naturalist)
Blackberry-Picking (Death of a Naturalist)
Personal Helicon (Death of a Naturalist)
Requiem for the Croppies (Door into the Dark)
The Wife's Tale (Door into the Dark)
Bogland (Door into the Dark)
Gifts of Rain (Wintering Out)
The Tollund Man (Wintering Out)
Wedding Day (Wintering Out)
Summer Home (Wintering Out)
Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication (North)
Funeral Rites (North)
North (North)
The Grauballe Man (North)
Exposure (North)
The Strand at Lough Beg (Field Work)
Casualty (Field Work)
Glannmore Sonnets VIII (Field Work)
The Harvest Bow (Field Work)
Widgeon (Station Island)
Station Island VII (Station Island)
From the Land of the Unspoken (The Haw Lantern)
Clearances 7 (The Haw Lantern)

Digging (Death of a Naturalist)

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

This is the only mention of guns in this poem. This is the only mention of guns (or bombs) in this volume, 'Death of a Naturalist.' The volume was published before the Troubles in Northern Ireland began. Date of publication of 'Death of a Naturalist: ' 1966. Date when The Troubles in Northern Ireland began: 1969. This isn't a forerunner of the poems which concern the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

For once, Neil Corcoran shows restraint. He obviously realizes that the poem has nothing to do with violence and he makes no comment on violence. Not so Helen Vendler. She's familiar with the chronology of the Troubles (she gives a short history of the earlier period in the chapter 'Archaeologies: North') and she ought to have realized the complete lack of reference to sectarian violence in this volume, but she still writes, 'The disturbing thing about 'Digging' is that the Irish Catholic child grew up between the offers of two instruments: the spade and the gun. 'Choose,' said two opposing voices from his culture: 'Inherit the farm,' said agricultural tradition; 'Take up arms,' said Republican militarism. And indeed the poet's first thought had been to measure, so to speak, the pen against the sword: 'Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.' This is to conceive of writing as, like war, politics by other means.'

This is an apology for criticism, not responsible poetry criticism. To stress the obvious, but not so obvious to Helen Vendler, the Irish Catholic child during the Troubles had many, many more choices - and the agricultural spade wasn't usually an option for the urban Catholics of Belfast and other places. Only a small proportion of Catholic children were tempted to take up arms or did take up arms later. Helen Vendler's simple-minded statement is grossly insulting to the great majority of Catholics who grew up in those years and grossly misguided.

Helen Vendler the critic has Seamus Heaney's endorsement. Quoting from my page 'Seamus Heaney: ethical depth:'

'From the 'Paris Review' interview with Seamus Heaney:

'INTERVIEWER

'What about your critics? Is there one you find especially perceptive?

HEANEY

'Well, reading Helen Vendler is always a corroboration. She is like a receiving station picking up on each poem, unscrambling things out of word-waves, making sense of it and making sure of it. She can second-guess the sixth sense of the poem. She has this amazing ability to be completely alive to the bleeper going off at the heart of it, sensitive to the intimacies and implications of the words and your way with them, and at the same time she has the ability to create the acoustic conditions where you can hear the poem best, the ability to set it within a historical context and to find its literary coordinates. And then there is just the sheer undimmed enthusiasm. Helen has been a friend to me as well as a critic, and the friendship has been tonic because all that critical élan comes out in her social self as sheer exhilarating intelligence. The great thing about Helen is not just her literary capacity, it's her sense of honesty, justice and truthfulness. I value these things deeply in her as a person and, naturally, they are part of her verity as a critic.'

This interview was published in 1994, before Helen Vendler's book on Seamus Heaney's poetry (published 1998) but Seamus Heaney has been constant in his admiration for Helen Vendler. For example, this much later comment in the book of interviews 'Stepping Stones' (published 2008): 'She has intensity, intelligence, perfect pitch - a uniquely gifted listener-in to poems.' This is a very great claim, particularly 'uniquely gifted ...' It's surely a ridiculous claim. Like so much else that Seamus Heaney says in his interviews, these comments have the right sound, to some people, but aren't nearly so impressive when examined carefully.

The gun in the opening of this poem can be regarded as a 'violation' in poetry of the principle known as 'Chekhov's gun,' the principle that there should be no unnecessary elements in a story. Objects which are introduced - a gun is only one example, of course - must be used later. If they aren't used, they should never have been introduced at all. Chekhov wrote:

"If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there." (From Gurlyand's 'Reminiscences of A. P. Chekhov.')

"If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there." (From S. Shchukin, 'Memoirs.')

Although the gun here is part of a simile, there's the same responsibility to make effective use of it. The associations of 'gun' are too potent for it to be mentioned once, as if in passing, and far too potent for its snugness in the hand to count as its only association: the intended {restriction} of association is a completely unrealistic {restriction}. This is the problem of factors, of {restriction} of factors and the unintended carrying-over of a factor.

Seamus Heaney here uses 'gun' too casually, just as 'blood' is often used too casually in poems. Again, 'blood' is a word with very potent associations, although the potent associations are often less - 'blood' has been so over-used that it has become a poetic 'cliché word.' (Not all clichés are phrases.) Poets sometimes use 'blood' gratuitously, including very substantial poets such as Paul Celan.

The first verse paragraph of Celan's 'Matière de Bretagne,' followed by my translation:

Ginsterlicht, gelb, die Hänge
eitern gen Himmel, der Dorn
wirbt um die Wunde, es läutet
darin, es ist Abend, das Nichts
rollt seine Meere zur Andacht,
das Blutsegel hält auf dich zu.

Broom-light, yellow, the hillsides
suppurate to high heaven, the thorn
courts the wound, there's ringing
in there, it's evening, Nothingness
rolls its seas to devotion,
the sail of blood is heading for you.

The usual translation of the first word, 'Ginsterlicht,' is 'Gorselight' but this is inaccurate. Giving the botanical names as well as the common names in English, not to be pedantic but because these names give the species without any risk of confusion, no matter what the language of the reader, 'der Ginster' is the plant 'broom,' Cytisus scoparius ssp. scoparius whilst 'gorse,' Ulex europaeus, is 'der Stechginster' in German. Both have golden-yellow flowers. A further reason for being accurate here is this. Celan visited the philosopher Heidegger and they went to Heidegger's hut in the Black Forest. Later, they went walking. Heidegger relates that he was impressed by Celan's knowledge of botany and we have good grounds for thinking that Celan wouldn't have confused broom and gorse.

Martin Seymour-Smith claims that the last line of this verse-paragraph is 'pseudo-expressionist cliché.' I think he's correct. Even though 'the sail of blood' may seem to belong to the same world as what precedes it, the conjunction of 'sail' and 'blood' has a 'literalness' which isn't poetically successful here. See some criticisms which I make of Seamus Heaney's unsuccessful 'literalness' in some cases in the meaningless-pointless-grotesque concrete. However, Paul Celan's poetry can obviously accommodate much more startling effects than the traditional poetry of Seamus Heaney.

Anne Carson gives an interesting discussion of the sail in her 'Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan.' She mentions the black and white sails of the Tristan legend and a red sail in Simonides, but I think it's very doubtful that Paul Celan took the 'sail of blood' from either of these sources.

At the end of 'Digging' there's a pen instead of a gun. And the poet decides that he'll dig with the pen.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

He obviously means that he'll be a writer, using the pen as the implement for his work, just as his father uses the spade as an implement in his work, but the literal and ridiculous image of him using the pen as a digging implement is impossible to dispel. Again, the intended {restriction} of association (to the pen's use as the tool of a writer) is a completely unrealistic {restriction}.

Fran Brearton's interpretation of the pen and the gun (in 'The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney') is dire: 'the implied association of pen, gun and penis.' Did Seamus Heaney actually imply this facile association? Was it in his mind as he wrote? Her method of interpretation allows her to find anything 'implied' which suits her thesis, in defiance often of the clear meaning of a text, common-sense, and sometimes human values.

Compare with this Freud's facile interpretation of a miner's strike - the miners' unwillingness to use their pick-axes (their penises) to penetrate the earth, regarded as feminine. The strikes of miners have generally belonged to a world of almost unimaginable harshness, concerned with very different matters. For example, at a meeting before miners began strike action in Northumberland and Durham in 1842: 'They catalogued the grim conditions in the mines, the bad air and long hours, the unjust system of fines, the payment by measure where the measures were set by the masters. They told of young children in the mines, of pay reductions ...' Or an earlier meeting before strike action began in Northumberland and Durham, in which one of the demands was for 'the reduction of hours for boys down the pit to twelve per day.' (Anthony Burton, 'The Miners.')

Fran Brearton perpetrates something similar. She admits that this is 'to take images out of context,' but she seems completely undeterred, when she writes that '... Digging deeper into the ground simulates the sexual act ...'

Neil Corcoran comments, 'The strain of over-determination ... shows up in the opening lines, where the pen is not only a spade but a gun, which seems at least one analogy too many for such a short poem ...' This seems an excessive criticism to me. There's {separation} of gun and spade. In the opening lines the pen is a gun, in the closing line a spade and there are 28 lines between them. This {distance} isn't too short.

The {distance} between 'analogies' in a poem by Derek Walcott tends to be much shorter, and very often too short. He often uses a torrent of analogies. In these lines, from Section III of 'The Fortunate Traveller,' the short intervals can be justified by the first line here 'There is no sea as restless as my mind.'

There is no sea as restless as my mind.
The promontories snore. They snore like whales.
Cetus, the whale, was Christ.
The ember dies, the sky smokes like an ash heap.
Reeds wash their hands of guilt and the lagoon
is stained. Louder, since it rained,
a gauze of sandflies hisses from the marsh.
Since God is dead, and these are not His stars,
but man-lit, sulphurous, sanctuary lamps,
it's in the heart of darkness of this earth
that backward tribes keep vigil of His Body,
in deya, lampion, and this bedside lamp.
Like lice, like lice, the hungry of this earth
swarm to the tree of life...

In his essay 'Seamus Heaney's Working Titles,' in 'The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney,' Rand Brandes writes 'In a virtuoso performance ... 'Digging' establishes the poet's most significant and versatile metaphor for the creative endeavour and the search for truth - digging.' This is a product of the word-sphere. The poem offers no basis for this comment. Its focus is almost entirely on manual work, without any suggestion that a spade could have anything to do with 'the creative endeavour and the search for truth.' The pen which is mentioned at the beginning of the poem is linked with a gun. Only at the end of the poem is the pen linked with the spade, in one of Seamus Heaney's forced and unconvincing linkages.

As for the 'virtuoso performance' claimed by Rand Brandes, a performance with 'dazzling skill or technique' (Collins English Dictionary) the poem offers no basis for this comment. It isn't the poetic equivalent of, for example, the 4th movement of Mozart's 41st Symphony.

Stanley Sadie (in his 'Mozart Symphonies') on the 'peroration' of this movement: '[four themes introduced earlier in the movement] are presented simultaneously, several times over in a variety of vertical permutations; it is not only a tour de force of counterpoint - Mozart had, of course, devised his themes with the idea of combining them in mind - but also, far beyond that, a truly magnificent effect, overwhelming in its concentrated display of the movement's material in a glitteringly brilliant fabric of sound.' The sonata rondo which forms the final movement of the Symphony No. 103 is an instance of Haydn the virtuoso composer. H. C. Robbins Landon and David Wyn Jones (Haydn: His Life and Music): 'The finale is a tour de force of thematic and harmonic argument in which the merest scraps of material produce paragraphs of tremendous tension and fire. Behind its dexterity one may again sense, as in no. 95, the stimulus of the last movement of Mozart's 'Jupiter Symphony; two of the main motives have a rhythmic resemblance to those used by Mozart.'

Poetic equivalents of musical virtuosity are difficult to find. I'd claim it, to some extent, for my unit poetry. I write in connection with one of the poems in unit form, ' It's a poem in centred rhyme, the first line rhyming with the last, the second line rhyming with the penultimate, and so on. The first line has exactly the same number of units - characters, punctuation marks and spaces- as the last (15) the second, which is longer, has exactly the same number of units as the next to the last (21) and so on. The lines are linked by sound, linked by length and linked by completion - the later line completes the earlier. The symmetrical poem expands and then contracts - the lines are augmented and diminished.'

The 'dazzling skill or technique' of a virtuoso performance aren't displayed in Seamus Heaney's use of rhyme in 'Digging:' 'thumb' and 'gun' are rhymed in the first two lines. The next three lines are rhymed, 'sound,' 'ground' and 'down.' The pattern so far is aa bbb, then, if it is a pattern. How is the pattern continued? In his use of rhyme, Seamus Heaney shows some strengths, but not here. Showing unrhymed lines by ! the scheme is aa bbb !!!! ... with unrhymed lines to the end of the poem - except that the 17th line rhymes with the 21st and the 29th line rhymes with the 1st. This can't be claimed as an innovation in rhyme schemes. As a comment now, not to indicate a further unrhymed line: (!)

Compare casualty, which has this 'rhyme scheme' in the first 24 lines:

abab c!c! efef ghgh ijij !k!k

The rhythm of 'Digging' is as faulty as the rhyming. Seamus Heaney's lack of rhythmic sense and his deficiencies in metre are a liability in so much of his poetry, or at least they diminish its impact. 'Digging' does begin with two lines with genuine rhythm, except that the effect is undermined:

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

(For this method of showing stresses, see scansion.)

The first line sticks out like a sore thumb. It's undermined by 'my' before 'thumb,' which gives three lightly-stressed syllables in a row, shown here as faint print. This second instance of 'my' is superfluous. It isn't needed for the meaning of the line and it blunts the impact of the metre. This is metre and meaning not integrated but going their own way. The light and tripping syllables go on almost to the end of the line. They would be appropriate if the line concerned something held lightly, which could easily be dropped, but the secure hold requires a strong and secure rhythm, one without any unnecessary lightly-stressed syllables. The firm hold on the pen established by the meaning of the first line is in conflict with its metre. The strong second line, separated from the fragility of the first line by the pause of the line ending, comes as a jarring and pointless contrast with the first.

Seamus Heaney is a poor reviser of his work. Simply cutting out the second 'my' would have given a more effective line, rhythmically stronger:

Between my finger and thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

The light syllables before 'finger' and within 'finger' too (the strong stress of the first syllable of 'finger' isn't as strong as the strong stress on 'thumb') would have given an effective contrast of meaning as well as metre: a finger isn't as broad or as sturdy as a thumb.

As the poem proceeds, some authentic strengths do emerge, strengths in the simple description of people as well as nature, of people in nature:

Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder ...

This isn't nearly as good a poem as the next one in the book, 'Death of a Naturalist,' which is very strong, though far from being the only very strong poem in the volume, also called 'Death of a Naturalist.' All the same, anyone reading 'Digging' at its publication would have realized, or should have realized, that this was a gifted poet, despite evidence of carelessness. For a long time, the vivid language masked the evidence of carelessness for a large number of readers. It still does, amongst many admirers.

Confining attention only to 'Digging' and 'Personal Helicon,' Rand Brandes is wide of the mark when he claims that 'From the opening poem of the book, 'Digging', to the closing poem, 'Personal Helicon', the poems are driven by the tensions between childhood innocence and insecurities and the adult realities and reconciliations.' This is a product of the word-sphere. The claim sounds good and impressive, but 'Digging' doesn't depict childhood innocence or insecurities, or adult realities and reconciliations. 'Personal Helicon,' a strong poem, depicts childhood enthusiasms or passions rather than innocence. It does depict insecurities, but not in any way adult realities and reconciliations. Seamus Heaney's adult world is adult to an extent, but comparison with a prose writer such as J M Coetzee exposes its drastic limitations. I discuss this further in my comments on St Kevin and the Blackbird.

Death of a Naturalist (Death of a Naturalist)

In his essay 'Heaney's Classics and the Bucolic,' the editor, Bernard O' Donoghue writes of 'the terrifying vision of the mature toads' in 'Death of a Naturalist, the title poem of the volume 'Death of a Naturalist.' In my pages on Seamus Heaney, I give many examples of his inaccuracy of language but here, the language is accurate, with, of course, the virtues of more than accuracy. He refers to the 'blunt heads' of the slime kings, so characteristic of common toads.

Unfortunately, these toads began life as 'frogspawn,' developed into 'nimble- / swimming tadpoles,' and after metamorphosis, using the word in its strict biological sense, into frogs. There's information about frogs (the least effective section in the poem.) 'The daddy frog' is called a bullfrog. 'The mammy frog / Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was / Frogspawn.'

Then, the poem becomes very involving: 'angry frogs / Invaded the flax dam.' A further metamorphosis, not biological but akin to the metamorphosis of Kafka's short story, was needed to convert the frogs into toads. It's this second kind of metamorphosis which Bernard O' Donoghue was referring to in 'the metamorphosis of the frogspawn which was collected with such delight into the terrifying vision of the mature toads ...'

With a few changes, it would have been easy to avoid any risk of confusion, by giving the animals the narrow heads of frogs. The frogs could have been given almost all the grossness of the toads, even if narrower heads are less gross than blunt heads.

What is going on here? Bernard O' Donoghue writes as if this metamorphosis was a conscious artistic choice on the part of the poet. He seems unable to recognize that Seamus Heaney has made a mistake here, perhaps as a result of not knowing the difference between frogs and toads - he may well have thought that he really was describing frogs in this section of the poem. If Seamus Heaney had written about swallows and swifts, it can't be guaranteed that he would have distinguished the two. Although he writes often about nature, he doesn't write as a naturalist, someone immersed in nature and knowledgeable about nature. (Of course, this kind of knowledge doesn't guarantee good poetry.)

This is a fault in the poem, because it leaves readers who have knowledge of the differences between frogs and toads, not at all advanced knowledge, uneasy. There are mistakes of continuity in films: as a blatant example, someone who speaks with an Irish accent in an early scene speaks with a Welsh accent in a later scene, for no obvious reason. Film studios have continuity specialists whose job it is to ensure continuity and consistency. This mistake in 'Death of a Naturalist' is a continuity mistake.

This is a superb poem in large part. The first eight lines, up to 'the warm thick slobber' are wonderful. 'clotted water' in the next line isn't nearly so good. It repeats, to an extent, 'thick slobber.' and the phrase 'grew like clotted water' suggests that water can grow, grow whilst clotting. From here until the end of the first verse stanza, the tone is matter of fact, not in effective contrast with the first eight lines but in an obvious contrast of artistic success. But the first eight lines really are good.

With the second verse paragraph, the poem becomes wonderful again, the continuity mistake a minor matter by comparison. These lines, like the opening lines, have been praised, and justifiably.

Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass and angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges

In 'the air was thick with a bass chorus,' the 'thick' brings to mind the 'thick' of 'warm, thick slobber' but the whole phrase is superb. The 'gross-bellied frogs' [or toads], their 'loose necks,' in fact everything in this paragraph is superb.

Blackberry-Picking (Death of a Naturalist)

This is a strong poem, but even so, the poem has many faults. Even if all the faults had been removed by intelligent revision, the achievement would still have been a limited one. The achievement is, after all, in a limited genre, the one which includes Laurie Lee's prose descriptions of his childhood in the Cotswolds. The achievement is to do with expression rather than feeling or insight. There are many non-poets who feel and have felt more deeply and interestingly than Seamus Heaney, the far greater poets likewise.

The poem belongs to prose-poetry, which I distinguish from prose poetry, even though the poem has an obvious rhyme scheme. There are direct rhymes, such as 'clot' and 'knot' and effective pararhymes (Seamus Heaney has distinct talents in pararhyme) such as 'jam-pots' and 'boots' but there comes a point when {distance} becomes excessive: 'pots' part-rhymed with 'boots' can be accepted, and even, perhaps, 'sweets' part-rhymed with 'in it' but surely not 'peppered' part-rhymed with 'Bluebeard's.' This is surely a non-rhyme, and the rhyme scheme of the whole poem, indicating non-rhymed lines by ! is:

aa bb cc dd ee ff gg !! hh ii jj kk

The opening may inspire confidence in many readers, who may feel, mistakenly, that this is a poet who knows what he's talking about, but I'm sure that the notion of Seamus Heaney the knowledgeable countryman should be treated with scepticism.

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

'Late August' is a poor way to begin a poem.

'Death of a Naturalist' begins with a similar indication of time, information which has not nearly enough poetic force for an opening.

All year, the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland ...

'All year' is also distracting. What about the previous year? If the flax-dam didn't fester then, why not? What caused it to fester this year? If it was the weighting of the 'huge sods' how did they come to be here this year but not previously?

Removing the information would have given an opening with far more power and without the risk of distracting questions,

The flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland ...'

Better still would have been this:

The flax-dam festered
in the heart of the townland ...

'Late August' in this poem is far from accurate. The ripening doesn't depend only upon the weather and is very variable, no matter what the weather. The claim seems to be that 'heavy rain,' unlike light rain, speeds up the ripening of blackberries. This isn't so. The 'heavy rain' and 'sun ' are obviously incompatible: it's possible for it to be raining lightly whilst the sun is shining (hence rainbows), but not for it to be raining heavily whilst the sun is shining, and certainly not for a full week. Heavy rain for a full week in Ireland in August can't be fully guaranteed but sun for a full week in late August is generally expecting too much. Anyone who has ever picked blackberries knows that there won't be 'just one' in the ripened state at the time when all the others are unripened.

'hard as a knot' gives an awkward ambiguity - a knot in a rope or string, or a knot in wood? If a knot in wood, then the surrounding wood is just as hard as the knot. This is ambiguity in specifying the referent of the simile. Ambiguity of referent can be intended and successful, giving resonance, but not here. It's essential to distinguish the ambiguity of the spoken poem from the ambiguity of the written poem, where the spoken poem is heard without reference to the written poem. The spoken poem has a further degree of ambiguity: with 'hard as a not' a possibility, referring to negations which are hard, such as 'You are not to go out.' This would have been surprising in such a traditional poem, but it could have been very effective in a more adventurous contemporary poem on the same subject.

The phrase 'red ones inked up' is only effective if it's assumed that ink is of one shade. There's black ink, blue ink, red ink, and other shades. Do the red ones, after 'inking up,' become blue or black or some other colour? The faulty assumption here is of one referent rather than multiple referents.

The 'tinkling bottom' (of the cans) becomes covered with blackberries. 'Tinkling' is only appropriate if hard, almost metallic, objects land on the hard bottom of the cans. Not even hard blackberries would make this sound. This is faulty factorization. The factors of the blackberries are taken to include metallic hardness rather than softness and the hardness of the hard blackberries.

In the remainder of the poem, the virtues are more prominent than the faults. I like, for example, 'the sweet flesh would turn sour.' Since 'Sweet' and 'sour' are two of the primary factors in taste, the phrase is satisfyingly basic. But

a rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache

isn't so good. There are black rats and brown rats in the British Isles, and 'grey' isn't exact but an arbitrary choice of colour. Here, there is {direction} from 'grey' to more than one referent. 'glutting' is transitive in ordinary English, as in 'to feed or supply beyond capacity' (Collins English Dictionary.) This use would be acceptable if there were some evidence of Seamus Heaney as experimenter in language, innovator in language. As it is, it seems an instance of the inaccuracy of Seamus Heaney the traditionalist in the established use of language.

Personal Helicon (Death of a Naturalist)

There isn't the least risk that Seamus Heaney will be missing from future histories of Anglo-Irish literature (and probably, despite his disapproval, from some histories of British literature as well.) This poem is one of the many reasons why. Here, matter-of-factness is raised to an inspired level. These are quiet, patient and thoughtful explorations, as childhood activity so often is, with none of the impetuousness of childhood, and the rat is 'scaresome' not terrifying. The poem is all the more effective because there is no irruption of terror into the poem. Terror would have been excessive in scale here.

The poem isn't perfect but seems so, whenever I read it. (Philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and John R. Searle point out that most concepts and distinctions have irreducible vagueness. Almost all poetry has irreducible imperfection.) As almost always, poetic rhythm is lacking but the succession of wonderful image-terms compensates (or, expressing it less charitably, deflects attention from the lack of strong rhythm.)

Most of Seamus Heaney's most impressive poems about childhood and country life read like re-workings of a prose passage, adapted prose. This piece of prose, from 'Mossbawn 1, Omphalos,' could easily have been adapted, to give a 'poem' the equal of many in 'Death of Naturalist.' The opening recalls Personal Helicon, 'I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky ....'

'I loved the fork of a beech tree at the head of our lane, the close thicket of a boxwood hedge at the front of the house, the soft, collapsing pile of hay in a back corner of the byre; but especially I spent time in the throat of an old willow tree at the end of the farmyard. It was a hollow tree, with gnarled, spreading roots, a soft, perishing bark and a pithy inside. Its mouth was like the fat and solid opening in a horse's collar, and, once you squeezed in through it, you were at the heart of a different life ... Above your head, the living tree flourished and breathed, you shouldered the slightly vibrant bole, and if you put your forehead to the rough pith you felt the whole lithe and whispering crown of willow moving in the sky above you.'

Later, there's a passage which recalls the 'scaresome' in 'Personal Helicon' or the threat from the frogs in 'Death of a Naturalist:'

'Scuffles in old leaves made you nervous and you dared yourself always to pass the badger's sett, a wound of fresh mould in an overgrown ditch where the old brock had gone to earth. Around that badger's hole there hung a field of dangerous force.'

I regard Seamus Heaney as a gifted writer, although not nearly as often as is usually supposed, but not a writer with the distinctive gifts of a gifted poet, except intermittently, such as the ability to create metrically, in distinctive poetic rhythms, not prose rhythms.

The vision of 'Personal Helicon' can be traced much further back than this passage. The English painter John Constable wrote long before this, 'The sound of water escaping from mill dams, willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts and brick-work, I love such things.'

Requiem for the Croppies (Door into the Dark)

The poem is historically simplistic. A poem which is historically simplistic may be artistically complex and artistically successful. I discuss history first and artistry second. From my page Ireland and Northern Ireland: distortions and illusions:

'The rebels themselves were far from blameless. They carried out atrocities before General Lake defeated them at Vinegar Hill. 'A group of at least 100 prisoners, overwhelmingly Protestant, and including women and children, was forced into a barn at Scullabogue, six miles east of New Ross, and burned alive. No one survived.' According to a survivor of the battle, 'about 95 Protestant hostages were taken out of prison on the day before the battle and stabbed to death by the pikemen on Wexford bridge.'

'Desperate people don't, usually, have a wide choice of potential helpers, from the very enlightened to the very unenlightened. The rebels chose France. France was aggressive and militarist, if in a more high-minded way than than some other aggressive and militarist states have been. France declared war on Austria and Prussia in 1792 and on Britain and Holland in 1793. In his essay, 'Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry from Northern Ireland,' Seamus Heaney writes, 'When England declared war on Revolutionary France, Wordsworth experienced a crisis of unanticipated intensity ....' but this is incorrect. It was France that declared war on Britain, on 1 February 1793.

'France was not only the enemy of Britain, it would also have been, in time, the enemy of Ireland. There's no indication at all that a victorious France would have been more enlightened in its relations to Ireland than Britain. The suffering that Napoleon brought to Europe was incalculable. Napoleon was an aggressive invader of other countries. Britain feared invasion by Napoleon and prepared against it. If Napoleon had not been defeated, it's very likely that he would have invaded Britain and that if he had been successful, he would have added Ireland to his list of conquests. The rebels of 1798 looked for help to France and the rebels of 1916 looked for help to Germany. Both appeals, for a Britain with survival at stake, amounted to treachery. All these considerations of international power politics are uncomfortable but inescapable. Many nationalists have preferred illusion to facing them.

'The rebels were following the lead of a secret society, the United Irishmen. From 'Ireland's Holy Wars,' by Marcus Tanner: '... while radical Protestants were thick on the ground among the intellectual leaders of the United Irishmen, they were thinly represented at the other end ... The leaders might preach the secular nationalism of the French Revolution. The ordinary pikemen were motivated by an age-old hatred of Protestants of all classes ... the rebels called their prisoners 'heretics.' '

If the English had failed to defeat the rebels, historically almost impossible, and failed to defeat Napoleon, not at all impossible, if the rebels had set up a nationalist Roman Catholic state, it's historically probable that Napoleon, the secularist and enemy of such states, would have turned his attention to it and invaded. The armed forces of this new Irish state would have opposed him and been crushed in battles, or a battle, with the carnage of Borodino. Napoleon would probably have opposed and curtailed Roman Catholic belief and practice more forcefully than the English.

'David A Bell, in his very impressive book 'The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Modern Warfare' has a chapter on the rebellion in the Vendée in 1793 - 1794. He mentions the killing in Southern France after the Protestant revolt of 1702 - 4 and in the Highlands of Scotland after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, but he writes 'the Vendée, however, occupies a different dimension of horror.' It occupies a different dimension of horror from the rebellion of 1798 as well. In the Vendée, 'According to the most reliable estimates, from 220 000 to 250 000 men, women and children - over a quarter of the population of the insurgent region - lost their lives there in 1793 - 94. The principal campaign against the Vendée's "Catholic and Royal" peasant armies, [Compare the predominantly Catholic, peasant armies of the Irish rebellion] which lasted from March to December of 1793, set a new European standard in atrocities. Then, at the start of 1794, the Republican general Louis-Marie Turreau sent twelve detachments of two to three thousand soldiers each marching across the territory in grid fashion, with orders to make it uninhabitable. These "hell columns" burned houses and woods, confiscated or destroyed stores of food, killed livestock, and engaged in large-scale rape, pillage, and slaughter. In some cases they killed only suspected rebels. In others, as at La Frocelière, they liquidated men, women and children indiscriminately, including "patriots" who had remained loyal to the Republic, on the grounds that no one still living in the Vendée could truly be loyal. In the port city of Nantes, the Republican authorities devised appalling new methods of mass murder to eliminate the "brigands" more efficiently and to reduce stress on the killers. Most hideously, they lashed thousands of prisoners into barges and lighters, which they then towed out into the Loire estuary and sank.'

' 'Writers favorable to the Revolution, meanwhile, while deploring "excesses," have insisted that horrors were committed on both sides and that the insurgents did, after all, side with France's enemies during wartime.' I'm not in the least an apologist for the Britain which quelled the Irish rebellion of 1798 but it's true that horrors were committed by both the British and the Irish and that Irish insurgents sided with Britain's enemy, France, during wartime. The France they sided with was the state which had perpetrated these atrocities.

'The relevance of this to Ireland, not just the action taken against Roman Catholicism but the pikes and scythes of the peasants will be obvious: 'In many of the more isolated areas, the Revolution's subjection of the Catholic Church to secular state authority cut deep into the tissue of communal life, with villages enraged at the dismissal of long-serving priests. In reaction, bubbles of anxiety and rage burst angrily on the surface of rural life. The most serious rioting took place after the fall of the monarchy in the fall of 1792, when crowds of peasants armed mainly with pikes and scythes occupied several towns in the region, leading to fighting that left up to a hundred dead.' The parallels extend too to the tactics of the rebels. 'Even after capturing several cannon, they rarely managed to stand in formal, pitched battles against the Republican forces. They preferred ambushes in the broken up and overgrown terrain and sudden, frenzied charges ...'

' 'What sustained them, above all, was religion. Witnesses described them marching in solemn silence, telling rosary beads, stopping for prayers, and crossing themselves before charging into combat. Priests accompanied them and before battles gave out remissions of punishments for sin.'

'Like the croppies, the rebels in the Vendée committed atrocities themselves. 'Both sides routinely put captured enemy soldiers to death. Each side justified its conduct by reference to the other. The Irish rebels looked for help from France, the enemy of Britain. The French rebels looked for help from Britain, the enemy of France. They retreated towards the English channel, in 'a forlorn attempt ... to open a French port to the British navy, which had been seeking one since France and Britain had gone to war in the spring.'

' 'The remnants of the Catholic and Royal Army made a futile last stand near the village of Savenay, on December 23, and were annihilated.' This was the rebels' battle of Vinegar Hill. Westermans wrote to the authorities in Paris, 'I do not have a single prisoner with which to reproach myself.' But the killing of the rebels went on and on after the annihilation of the rebels' army.

'English misrule In Ireland was a fact, but it's easy to forget - Seamus Heaney certainly finds it easy to forget - that enlightened rule was very scarce in the eighteenth century, as in other centuries.

'In 'Irish Freedom: the History of Nationalism in Ireland,' Richard English writes, 'Much of the old orthodoxy regarding eighteenth-century Ireland has now been reconsidered in scholarly analysis: stark assumptions concerning the supposedly appalling oppression of Catholics, the antagonism between aristocracy and peasantry, the idea of English misrule as the cause of Irish economic problems, or even the colonial quality of the Irish-English relationship itself - all of these have been questioned to some degree.' '

Requiem for the Croppies' is a flawed poem, but one with great pathos. Much of the pathos and feeling come from the poet, but not all. The bare historical record has overwhelming pathos, but is more complex and also more disturbing than the poem would have us believe.

This is a poem which doesn't increase in stature with many readings, with living with the poem, with entering into the world of the poem again and again. The poem is too careless in language, matters of fact and rhythm to be anything like a masterpiece. The poet's consciousness can never give the experience of deep feeling directly to another consciousness, obviously, but is totally dependent upon words, their choice and arrangement. This poem, despite its impact, doesn't have 'the best words in the best arrangement.'

The poem is compiled, to an extent, as well as created. So, for example, the tactic mentioned in the poem of stampeding cattle into infantry is the 'transfer of fact' into the poem: the rebels stormed into the town of Enniscorthy - Vinegar Hill lies just outside the town - by overwhelming the defenders with stampeding cattle. The transfer of fact isn't completely successful in 'We'd cut through reins and rider with the pike.' The rebels did use pikes to cut through the reins of cavalry, inventive tactics, but in this line, it's claimed that the pikes were used for 'cutting' the rider as well, the usual, uninventive tactics - or more exactly, 'cutting through' the rider, chopping the rider in half. This is careless language. The language of 'We found new tactics happening each day' is weak and weedy. 'Happening' doesn't do justice to the desperate inventiveness of the rebels.

The opening line

The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley

and the closing line

And in August the barley grew up out of the grave

are contrived. They belong to the world of 'self-consciously significant details' which are routine in many war films, in films of all kinds. I think of a detail in the film 'A Bridge too Far' where a soldier plays the flute. Towards the end of the film, after the fighting, he's shown with bandaged hands - no longer able to play the flute. The rebels are shown throughout externally, descriptively, without any searing insights into the consciousness of any of them - but this fault is general in Seamus Heaney's poetry. The rebels seem almost like film extras on location, in a place resembling Vinegar Hill. Seamus Heaney as director is sensitive to an extent, but obviously lacks the gifts of Tolstoy, directing his characters in the battle scenes of 'War and Peace.'

Dennis O' Driscoll, in 'Heaney in Public,' (a chapter in 'The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney') gives the valuable information that in a (very poor) poem written in 1972, 'The Road to Derry,' Seamus Heaney wrote, in connection with the shootings on Bloody Sunday:

And in the dirt lay justice like an acorn in the winter
Till its oak would sprout in Derry where the thirteen men lay [dead.

And that Neil Corcoran has pointed out the similarities between this ending and the last line of 'Requiem for the Croppies.' The acorn that would sprout is far more contrived than the barley of 'Requiem,' but they belong to the same world.

The metre of

And in August the barley grew up out of the grave

would undermine even a completely uncontrived line: instead of a majestic, weighty closing line, the fussiness of the syllables 'up out of the,' not all of them unstressed, but none of them with the strong stress of 'grave.' Seamus Heaney is an undistinctive and undistinguished metrist, and this line is more evidence.

My approach to lines of poetry gives great emphasis to scale, a generalization of Aristotle's conception of 'megethos.' In this link, I explain scale in connection with Seamus Heaney's poetry. This line, like the line 'We found new tactics happening each day' doesn't have enough weight, it's without sufficient scale, and 'up out of the' is mainly to blame.

So much of the 'factual' information in the poem doesn't carry conviction. This is a poet I'm prepared to trust, but not to a very great extent. Doubts multiply, great and small. Barley is more or less inedible until cooked. It has to be converted into bread, gruel or soup. So, despite, 'No kitchens on the run,' the need for cooking. Moving 'quick and sudden' is out of the question when the only means of getting around is walking. 'in our own country' is unnecessary and ineffective.' 'on the hike' introduces a false note. Hiking is recreational, hiking is for pleasure. It doesn't belong to the dangerous world of the croppies. 'Tramp' is there surely for the rhyme. Tramps are untypical, very marginal members of society. This was a a society with large numbers of the destitute. Retreating through hedges is usually impossible, unless the hedges are hardly hedges at all. Fast moving cavalry would be able to stop the retreat of the slowly moving rebels without any difficulty.

This is a sonnet, of a kind, with a very effective volta or 'turn of thought and feeling,' when the partial successes of desperate, fugitive people against an organized army, described in the first nine lines - in regular sonnets such as the Italian, the turn usually comes at the end of the eighth line - are ended and their hopes are crushed on Vinegar Hill, 'the fatal enclave,' where

Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.

It could be said that after the volta, 'shaking scythes' at cannon is concentration on 'scythes' purely for effect - another instance of contrived 'filmic' significance. The rebels had weapons - pikes - too, but scythes opposed to cannon are more poignant. I'm sure, though, that the wording can be defended. I'm sure, too, that weighing up the merits and disadvantages of wording can be defended. The suffering of these people doesn't make disagreements about wording irrelevant. As I wrote earlier, 'The poet's consciousness can never give the experience of deep feeling directly to another consciousness, obviously, but is totally dependent upon words, their choice and arrangement.'

'The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave' is bad. Blushing is to do with embarrassment and only minor shame. Neil Corcoran comments, 'the verb's [that is, 'blushed'] vividly peculiar but appropriate personification dramatizes the sense of shame taken into the land itself by the atrocity committed on it.' This can't be defended. He quotes the full phrase but concentrates attention on 'blushed,' ignoring 'soaked' - soaked in blood. Blushing is colouring of the skin which is drastically different from the colour of human blood. 'Our broken wave,' though, is superb, as is 'terraced thousands' in the previous line.

The line

They buried us without shroud or coffin

is more straining for significance. A little thought or knowledge shows its near sentimentality, at odds with the stronger aspects of the poem. These are the more rigorous aspects of the poem, the poem's insights into the harshness of reality. (But historical fact is far more horrific, far harsher.) In battles in this period of history and throughout history the defeated have never had shrouds or coffins, or the victors either. Try to imagine armies transporting coffins before battles, for the proper burial of the dead, when the time came.

The Wife's Tale (Door into the Dark)

This poem has hardly any weaknesses. Its characterization isn't a characterization in depth but is satisfying, and it achieves something rare in poetry - making machinery the subject of poetry.

Although some poets in the 1930's wanted to make pylons poetic, there's an immense gulf between 'mentioning' and 'showing.' 'Showing' goes beyond bare mention. 'Showing' does justice to machinery. I'd stress the dependence of people on machinery for the comforts and conveniences and necessities of life, the dependence of people on machinery to lift them from material deprivation and suffering to the possibility of experiencing something better, but at the very least, 'showing' in poetry has to present machinery as having as much concrete importance as any other subject in poetry, and this is achieved in 'The Wife's Tale.'

There are only a very few lines in the poem and in Seamus Heaney's poetry as a whole about mechanical matters, but they have all the qualities of his best poetry about nature:

The hum and gulp of the thresher ran down
And the big belt slewed to a standstill, straw
hanging undelivered in the jaws.

And, after '... the half filled bags,' 'the bags gaped / where the chutes ran back to the stilled drum.'

These lines are just about enough to suggest what might have been: Seamus Heaney as one of the best contemporary poets of the machine age.

Bogland (Door into the Dark)

We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening -

This is the vivid opening of one of Seamus Heaney's strongest and least flawed poems - so vivid that the image persists and it's difficult to avoid seeing a big sun sliced by the bogland as well as the prairies. (If the implication is that the Bogland can't have this slicing effect on the sun, then it's obviously mistaken.) The prairies are big, extensive. They intensify the bigness of the sun and the big sun intensifies the bigness of the prairies: mutual intensification.

'at evening' in the second line is surely unnecessary information about time. Compare the references to time in the openings of the poems 'Death of a Naturalist' and Blackberry-Picking. At sunrise, the sun isn't 'sliced' by the land but seems gradually to emerge from it. It's obvious that the reference is to sunset, which is just before evening or marks the beginning of evening, so that 'at evening' adds nothing but takes away something of the impact of the lines - more so, of course, if the reader is aware that the phrase is superfluous.

The sun over the Bogland is like an absentee landlord, seen only rarely in these sombre expanses. 'the sights of the sun' is very effective here:

... Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.

On the other hand,

Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encroaching horizon,

sounds well but is generic. It could fit most landscapes.

'the eye ... is wooed into the cyclops eye / Of a tarn' is excellent, for its use of 'cyclops eye' as well as for 'wooed.' The gentle coaxing of 'wooed' may seem not to fit this landscape, but later, the ground is described as 'kind.' The fact that landscape may be neither harsh, uncompromising nor gentle but both is well conveyed in this subtle and varied poem.The use of 'tarn' is surprising. Tarns are small lakes or large pools in the mountains.

They've taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up
An astounding crate full of air.

The only obvious flaw in this verse paragraph, very effective in its placement in the poem, something of a discovery for the reader after the first two verse paragraphs, like the discovery of the Elk itself, seems to me a comma missing after 'up.' And the usual flaw, the lack of effective poetic rhythm.

In the next stanza, the 'white' of the recovered butter and the 'black' butter of the ground itself are vivid in their contrast.

The ground itself is kind, black butter

Melting and opening underfoot,

In the next two lines

Missing its last definition
By millions of years.

'definition' is an inert abstraction and 'millions of years' would be inert too, a vague and generalized statement, except that 'millions of years' forms an effective contrast with the butter, 'sunk under / more than a hundred years'

The poetry becomes memorable again immediately, with the contrast between 'They'll never dig coal here,' familiar human activity, and the unexpectedness of things which are soft, not hard like coal.

Only the waterlogged trunks
Of great firs, soft as pulp.

The contrast between soft and hard, like the earlier contrast between white and black, is deeply satisfying, but both coal and the waterlogged trunks are reminders of a past which is remote, they remind us of the strangeness of existence, in which cheering warmth can be given by something formed in a remote geological era and in which hard trunks are softened: the mystery of metaphysical change and transformation.

The 'striking' in 'Our pioneers keep striking' abruptly reasserts the associations of hardness after the softness of 'soft as pulp,' a momentary but effective intrusion into the softness which dominates the poem as far as the superb closing lines:

The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.

The unending 'bottomless' is an unexpected, audacious and completely successful end to the poem.

Helen Vendler makes some excellent comments on 'Bogland:' 'Bogland' does not envisage horrors to be found within it. Resisting the usual image of bog-discovery - medieval gold objects - Heaney clearly seeks either domestic ordinariness (butter) or evolutionary astonishment (the giant elk) ... All this changes when archaeology ceases to be interesting and beneficent, and instead is interrogated for an explanation of violence.'

But I do question the effectiveness of such distant relics of violence in arousing feeling, the vivid feeling for the horror of violence. Exhuming the victims of violence in a Balkan conflict from a few decades ago or victims of violence on a First World War battlefield can elicit intense emotions of horror, but not, surely, such remote victims as the bog people. Far more likely is the emotion of astonishment, that the remains can be so well-preserved. This is one objection. Another is that Seamus Heaney is using {substitution}, which deflects attention from present-day sufferings in favour of a less harrowing, more congenial archaeological world. Yeats resorted to {substitution} too, of a very different kind, escaping into his private mythology, which did, though, have important artistic advantages. The artistic advantages of Seamus Heaney's artistic archaeology are real, but to claim that they offer great insights into suffering is surely mistaken.

Gifts of Rain (Wintering Out)

'Gifts of Rain' survived the process of selection used to compile the 'New Selected Poems 1966 - 1987: ' not an instance of Survival of the Fittest. Neil Corcoran painstakingly explores the allegory of the poem. In general, allegory has many pitfalls, allowing anything to mean almost anything, or so it seems, sometimes. To earnest and ingenious commentators, allegories provide many opportunities for the exercise of their skill, and artistically bad allegories just as many opportunities as artistically good allegories - but I'd question if allegories now are as likely to be artistically good as in the past. The allegory form may now have reached exhaustion.

Sections I and II consist of the routine writing I refer to, following Gerard Manley Hopkins, as 'Parnassian,' without a single strong line, a single word with semantic force. But this description flatters the poetry. Sections I and II are worse than routine. For example:

... So

he is hooped to where he planted
and sky and ground

are running naturally among his arms
that grope the cropping land.

Section III starts much more strongly, full of anticipation:

When rains were gathering
there would be an all-night
roaring of the ford.

But then a succession of abysmal lines, such as

Their world-schooled ear

and, after the significant pause between one stanza and the next, an opportunity and a challenge which Seamus Heaney habitually makes nothing of, as here (see enjambment.)

could monitor the usual
confabulations, the race
slabbering past the gable,

Here, the concrete (self-consciously concrete, too obscurely concrete, routinely concrete) 'slabbering' is almost as ineffective as 'confabulations. Similarly, 'blood' is as ineffective as 'shared calling' in the lines

in the shared calling of blood

arrives my need
for antediluvian lore.

after the very poor lines

I cock my ear
at an absence -

There are random number generators. The phrases in these lines read like the product of a 'phrase generator' which combines random words. Neil Corcoran is oblivious to their poorness, too intent upon his insight that 'The 'absence' which the poet's ear picks up is that of the older native 'lore' of pre-colonial Gaelic civilization ('antediluvian', presumably, because prior to the flood of colonization).' His allegorical interpretation of 'antediluvian' is reminiscent of those theological interpretations which made Noah's flood the basis of some very surprising and far-fetched claims.

The first three lines of this section turn out to be the only strong lines.

Section IV

The beginning of this section raises hopes,

The tawny guttural water

This line loses much of its concrete force if it's subjected to the allegorical treatment, but Neil Corcoran isn't deterred. It represents, allegedly, 'a new political possibility for Ireland: one which, in some harmonizing and reconciling way, will 'pleasure' the poem's 'I', making him a 'Dives', the paradigmatic biblical rich ...' This is Neil Corcoran as theologian rather than Neil Corcoran as critic.

These are the lines which are supposed to support this interpretation. Moyola, the river,

bedding the locale
in the utterance,
reed music, an old chanter

breathing its mists
through vowels and history.
A swollen river,

a mating call of sound
rises to pleasure me, Dives,
hoarder of common ground.

He misses the point that this is surely very poor poetry. For example, the conjunction of 'vowels and history' is meaningless. (If a word which is meaningless or almost meaningless in the context sounds convincing enough, Seamus Heaney is often happy to include it. Dylan Thomas did the same thing but with more impressive results.) How could he possibly justify these lines artistically? What was Helen Vendler playing at when she overlooked or evaded the challenge of lines like this? A responsible scientist who is faced with observations which potentially falsify a hypothesis put forward by the scientist examines the matter closely, and, if need be, abandons the hypothesis, no matter what the sacrifice. These lines, like so many others, are a challenge to Helen Vendler's conviction of Seamus Heaney's near perfection.

The claims made for Seamus Heaney are often very radical, stopping well short of the power of miraculous healing but including miraculous gifts of language and in the world of ideas. Dennis O' Driscoll, in 'Heaney in Public,' one of the essays in 'The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney' claims that 'Every idea is examined afresh, as every word is coined anew.' Every idea is examined afresh! Every word is coined anew! Are all five words in 'could monitor the usual / confabulations' coined anew? Bernard O' Donoghue, the editor of this volume, ought to have had a few words with Dennis O' Driscoll, and made it clear that this claim couldn't possibly be justified and shouldn't appear in any self-respecting book, and certainly not one published by the Cambridge University Press. The Press had its reputation to consider, and so did he, as editor, and an academic at Wadham College, Oxford University.

'This claim of Dennis O' Driscoll's is 'falsified' very quickly, with a quotation from Seamus Heaney just a few lines later, one without any freshness or originality in wording or in the idea, 'no poetry worth its salt is unconcerned with the world it answers for and sometimes answers to.' (This quotation comes from 'The Peace of the Word' in 'The Sunday Times Culture Supplement.')'

The Tollund Man (Wintering Out)

Neil Corcoran's discussion of this poem (in 'The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study) is ingenious, to an extent, accomplished, to an extent, plausible, to an extent, but deeply unintelligent and radically misguided. He has a familiar failing, amongst his other failings - he can't resist the opportunity to pursue a concept, a theory, a word, with the instincts of a single-minded, simple-minded hunting dog rather than the complex judgments of a critic. What lies before him, the given, the poem itself, often seems to take second place to his explorations of concepts, theories and words, as in his discussion of this poem, when he pursues the ramifications of the word 'tongue.' His book is subtitled 'A Critical Study' but again and again he abandons the critical attitude.

In the poem, the poet imagines himself driving in Denmark

Saying the names

Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.

Pointing out that he doesn't understand Danish whilst driving in Denmark is something uninteresting, not worth mentioning, as well as slack in expression.

'Tongue' surely, has no more currency in living English than 'pulchritude,' meaning, of course, 'beauty.' In the living contemporary language (not the living 'tongue') the word refers only to the thing inside the mouth cavity, not to speech or language. Seamus Heaney's reference in 'The Tollund Man' to not knowing the 'tongue' of the country people is an archaism. Perhaps, as an extenuating circumstance, 'tongue' wasn't quite such an archaism at the time that Seamus Heaney wrote as now.

Neil Corcoran's discussion is extended and fatuous: English, the 'tongue' used by Seamus Heaney, isn't 'native or original to the land he comes from - Ireland' - that's true enough. Neil Corcoran's claim that English is 'the imposition of the colonial oppressor' is far more vulnerable. This is Neil Corcoran as shrill advocate of tired theoretical platitudes. Surely Seamus Heaney should be speaking Irish and writing in Irish by choice? But there are good reasons why he doesn't. It isn't due to weakness on his part. As a matter of strict fact, Seamus Heaney isn't at all fluent in Irish. He has a restricted knowledge of the language. He obviously hasn't thought it important to learn the language well. The language is interesting and obviously very significant for an understanding of Ireland and Irish literature. I myself bought a textbook of Irish and studied it for a short time. But Neil Corcoran's comments are excessive.

It's a relief to return to 'The Tollund Man,' even though it is written in English, the language of 'the colonial oppressor' rather than Irish.

This is the first verse-paragraph:

Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.

The second line is fairly humdrum (it requires very little inventiveness for Seamus Heaney to use the imagery of peat) the third and fourth lines are memorable. As for the first line, even if 'some day' is a disappointing way to start a poem, its vagueness is defensible. It gains by being contrasted with the very specific 'to Aarhus.'

The next lines

In the flat country near by
Where they dug him out,

there's the routine giving of information, before the far more interesting

His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach,

'Caked' is excellent, the lines in their entirety are excellent.

Then, even the specific 'Naked except for / The cap, noose and girdle' are ineffective, and more so all the lines up to but not including,

Now his stained face
Reposes at Aarhus.

This is dignified and more than dignified, majestic.

There follow inconspicuous, unsuccessful lines until the final verse-paragraph

Out there in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.

Here, 'Jutland,' like 'Aarhus,' is an evocative place-name. Seamus Heaney has been condemned for making sectarian killing seem almost natural. Here, 'at home' has to be condemned and the attitude of Seamus Heaney has to be condemned. Poets have very often been outsiders, on the margins of society, alienated from the customs and ways of life of their society even when they cause no great harm. Seamus Heaney, though, feels 'at home,' not alienated, even in the midst of sectarian killing. In general, I very much prefer the alienated poets, the outsiders, such as Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud, to the non-alienated poets, which is not the same as saying that I always prefer their poetry.

Wedding Day (Wintering Out)

This is an uncharacteristic poem. Exposure has an authentic note of disillusionment and weariness which are uncharacteristic of his poetry but not at extreme {distance}. Wedding Day is different. There are notes of hysteria and uncontrolled emotion - the emotion in all his other poetry is safely under control, even tame, with exceptions - or missing completely. The later part of the poem is more measured, but for just a few moments, the poet allows his defences against emotional anarchy to slip slightly. He might have a reputation by now as a fearless poet of immense range, including extreme emotion as well as quiet, tender emotion (which he conveys wonderfully well in a few places) if he had gone beyond these beginnings.

The poem begins

I am afraid.

As in the case of 'How did I end up like this?' in 'Exposure,' a seemingly unexceptional statement is significant here.

The next lines are intrinsically strong but they could have been improved very easily.

Sound has stopped in the day
And the images reel over
And over ...

The images continue but the sound stops. This is arbitrary. The whole scene is presumably imagined and in imagination sound and images can both continue. The impact is far more powerful if, instead of sound ending, sound is imagined as so forceful that

Sound has stopped the day

The rhythm of 'Sound has stopped the day' is more forceful than the fussy rhythm of 'Sound has stopped in the day.'

The end of a line and the beginning of a line are the points of maximum exposure in a poem and give the opportunity for maximum emphasis. Yeats had the sense to put the powerful word 'reel' at the beginning of a line, in 'The Second Coming:'

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The lines

And the images reel over
And over ...

give undue prominence to 'And' and not enough prominence to 'reel.' 'over and over' is a forceful phrase but the phrase is split, with poetically disastrous results.

Instead,

The images reel
over and over

would have had improved word distribution within the lines. Now, 'reel' and 'over and over' have full effect.

Despite, supposedly, the sound stopping -

You sing behind the tall cake
Like a deserted bride

- irrational behaviour, no doubt, but very interesting. What follows is just as interesting. The bride is 'demented' but 'goes through the ritual' although 'goes through' is obviously improvable.

Tension is relaxed in the last verse paragraph. The 'skewered heart' and 'legend of love' are interesting in their banality, more to be expected in a Philip Larkin than a Seamus Heaney poem. 'airport' has associations of drab utility now rather than a place where voyages of discovery begin. The highly charged events are over very quickly. Is this relaxation of tension effective? I think it is. Intensity and duration often have a reciprocal linkage. Intense events are often brief. This gives an effective close to an unusual poem, a poem I rate highly. If he doesn't have a particularly high reputation as a varied and versatile poet then this poem is evidence to the contrary.

When I went to the gents
There was a skewered heart
And a legend of love. Let me
Sleep on your breast to the airport.

Summer Home (Wintering Out)

This is one of those poems which end well after beginning badly and continuing badly. The better part is confined to the last of five verse paragraphs. I discuss in detail the last line of all 'Our love calls tiny as a tuning fork' on the page concerned with metaphor (and simile).

I've tuned a string instrument, of one kind or another, countless times using the tiny, plaintive note of a tuning fork. This line is a very effective end to the poem. It has a strong appeal for me, even though I recognize that it's the tiny sound of the tuning fork, not the tiny tuning fork itself, which Seamus Heaney obviously intends here.

The rest of this final verse paragraph is one of those select places in his poetry where he shows that he's imperfect, human, in a human world which like the wider natural world is imperfect. (Compare, for example, the fungus on the blackberries in 'Blackberry-Picking' and the rotten flax in 'Death of a Naturalist.')

In the first line of this verse paragraph, 'My children weep out the hot foreign night,' 'weep out' isn't so good, mainly because 'weep,' like the 'tongue' I criticize in connection with The Tollund Man, is becoming archaic. But 'the hot foreign night' is unexpectedly successful, ordinary enough words with great impact. The impact of 'my foul mouth' is as great: again, the use of ordinary enough words, but part of the impact comes from this glimpse of Seamus Heaney in a very unfamiliar role. The measured and prudent observations of Seamus Heaney the Politician of Poetry are at the furthest extreme from these candid words.

' ... we lie stiff till dawn' is superb, or would be superb, if the impact hadn't been lessened by the next line. It turns out that this isn't a self-contained phrase with huge impact but only the first part of this: 'we lie stiff till dawn / Attends the pillow, and the maize, and vine // that holds its filling burden to the light.' The continuation isn't nearly so good, but the continuation of this continuation is quite different:

Yesterday rocks sang when we tapped
Stalagtites in the cave's old, dripping dark -

The tapping of the rocks, the singing of the stalactites are a good but far from perfectly judged introduction to the tiny ringing of the tuning fork in the last line. 'Singing' amounts here to hyperbole and the rocks are treated as separate from the stalagtites. They wouldn't sing just because the stalagtites were tapped. The description of the dark as 'old, dripping' is too obvious, but at least provides a suitably neutral context for the more vivid phrasing before and after it. The importance of providing a neutral, low-key context in poetry in some circumstances has been underestimated.

Poetry, like music, need not always be full of incident or have obvious impact. In the trio of his First Symphony, Beethoven made an important innovation, 'the use of almost empty spaces in harmonic architecture.' 'The section after the double bar begins with no fewer than eighteen bars in which nothing happens except an airy exchange between first violins and horns and clarinets ...' (Basil Lam in 'The Symphony, 1: Haydn to Beethoven' edited by Robert Simpson.)

The opening of the poem may seem impressive:

Was it wind off the dumps
or something in heat

dogging us, the summer gone sour,
a fouled nest incubating somewhere?

These lines are Shakespearean rather than contemporary - but not, of course, anything like authentically Shakespearean. They have a concreteness and vigour, but they are undermined by thinking which is closer to Shakespearean than contemporary. 'Was it ... ?' implies that the disharmony which is the subject of the poem was caused by 'wind off the dumps,' 'something in heat / dogging us,' 'the summer gone sour:' a world in which events which are unlinked in any modern conception are linked and have spurious significance here.

In isolation, 'wind off the dumps' and 'the summer gone sour' are good, but 'something in heat / dogging us' is poor because the reference is obviously to a dog in heat and so the vagueness of 'something' is contradictory. 'a fouled nest incubating somewhere' is a defect of scale. The line is excessive in itself, but even if it could be justified in itself, by this time, the accumulation of things rotten in the state of this holiday home has become excessive. The disharmony which is related later isn't of a scale to justify it.

'inquisitor / of the possessed air' suggests very strongly the poetry of Geoffrey Hill. Here, I don't think it has an obvious meaning, or any of the remaining lines in the first section.

This section, like the second and the third, is made up almost entirely of two-line verse paragraphs. These make the lines seem portentous. The fourth and fifth sections are made up of four line verse paragraphs. These are more effective.

At the beginning of the second section, 'Bushing the door' reads like a printing error for 'Brushing the door.' Collins English Dictionary gives for 'bush,' used transitively, 'to cover, decorate, support etc. with bushes.' It seems an unlikely action to decorate a door in a holiday home with 'wild cherry and rhododendron.' 'Brushing' against the door whilst carrying the wild cherry and rhododendron indoors seems far more likely.

The 'lost' in 'her small lost weeping' is poor, adding nothing to 'small' - the word seems 'lost' in the line - and 'small' isn't as effective as 'tiny' in the last line of the poem.

The rest of this section isn't improved by the intrusion of references to Roman Catholic practice, the 'May altar' and even more so the 'sweet chrism,' 'chrism' being a mixture containing oil used in Roman Catholic (and Greek Orthodox) churches. The flowers 'taint' to a 'sweet chrism,' a contradiction very hard to justify.

In the third section, 'under the homely sheet' contains an obvious contradiction. The sheet, just one sheet, suggests the hot foreign night but 'homely' not at all. Summer nights are rarely hot enough in Ireland for one single sheet to be practicable. The phrase isn't an evocative one.

The 'cold' in '.. and lay as if the cold flat of a blade / had winded us' contradicts the heat but is otherwise effective, except that it seems all too obviously included for effect.

More and more I postulate
thick healings

is very poor - as is the whole of the fourth section.

Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication (North)

1 Sunlight

Seamus Heaney has written here a poem approaching perfection.

There was a sunlit absence.
The helmeted pump in the yard
heating its iron,
water honeyed

in the slung bucket
and the sun stood
like a griddle cooling
against the wall

of each long afternoon.

The conjunction of concrete and abstract in 'a sunlit absence' is a very successful paradox. 'honeyed' is very evocative, and very effective. I stress the importance of considering factorization in examinations of metaphor and simile. The factors are the relevant characteristics. Sometimes many factors are relevant, sometimes only one. The skill of the writer lies in excluding all the factors but this one and sometimes this factor is unexpected. Often, an unwanted factor is carried over, distractingly. The factors of 'honey' include thickness - honey is more viscous than water - sweetness and colour, golden or golden-brown. The factor of colour is carried over successfully, the irrelevant factors of thickness and sweetness are successfully excluded. The griddle, the evocative utensil of Irish cooking, heating potato cakes over peat fires, is compared with the sun by a masterly simile. The factors carried over, successfully, are shape and heat.

For once, Seamus Heaney's use of stanza enjambment is superbly memorable, not so much in the transition 'water honeyed // in the slung bucket' as in the transition 'against the wall // of each long afternoon' (using '/' for the transition from line to line and '//' for the transition from one stanza to another.) Place and time are separated but conjoined.

At this level of achievement - and much lower levels of achievement - the contribution or otherwise of single words and single punctuation marks is important and sometimes a matter for conflicting opinions. (When the interpretations of very gifted instrumentalists is discussed, then subtleties become very important - can a slight stress upon one note be justified? Compare Oscar Wilde, who worked for hours on some writing and removed a single comma. This wasn't all he did in that time. After further reflection he replaced the comma. Writing demands perfectionism.)

I think that the line 'and the sun stood' would have been better as 'the sun stood.' The use of 'and' may perhaps suggest, even if only slightly, an afterthought here. This is debatable, but the phrase 'in the yard' is surely superfluous. It's clear enough that the pump was outside, and 'yard' gives a little information but is completely lacking in concrete specificity. This topographical information is unnecessary. It's no more important to state where the pump was - in the yard - than to state that it was in the yard a short distance from a boundary wall and a slightly greater distance from the wall of a cottage. Here, the poetic sculptor hasn't removed everything extraneous, to convey his beautiful vision with the utmost simplicity. Removal of 'in the yard' would have shortened the {distance} between the 'h' of 'helmeted' and the 'h' of 'heated' so that the linkage of sound would have been more effective. So, I think that this version would have been even finer:

There was a sunlit absence.
The helmeted pump
heated its iron,
water honeyed

in the slung bucket,
the sun stood
like a griddle cooling
against the wall

of each long afternoon.

'by the window,' in the lines

... where she stood
in a floury apron
by the window.

can be compared with 'in the yard.' It too lacks concrete specificity. It's too plain. This window demanded an adjective, or more than one adjective, but certainly not removal. Helen Vendler makes the comparison with Vermeer. This is very high praise, but it can perhaps be justified, if the comparison is with 'the world of Vermeer' rather than the artistic achievement of a particular painting. Although the world of Vermeer is very different from what is often supposed - for example, moral lessons are there, intended by Vermeer but hidden by changes in outlook - its beauty and serenity is unchanged. Windows are very prominent in so many of the paintings of Vermeer, of course, but here the window resembles not at all the windows in Vermeer. Like 'the yard,' it's simply information about positioning, the positioning of the human subject. An adjective or two might have established a deeper significance.

What follows gives a necessary animation to break the spell of the first section of the poem. It doesn't destroy the Vermeer-like scene (which is also Vermeer-unlike in so many ways). Norbert Schneider writes of Vermeer: '... his strongly individualized figures tend to appear alone or almost alone, busy at everyday tasks, reading letters or pouring milk. There is no bustle, tension or agitation of the kind typical of Dutch narrative genre paintings of the period.'

There are no miscalculations in this scene of transformed and extraordinary ordinariness, except, I think, in the lines

here is a space
again, the scone rising
to the tick of two clocks.

There seems to be no justification for the line break after 'space.' Lines can't be expected to be always 'self-sufficient' and to contain complete phrases or clauses, but this seems to me better, less awkward in its distribution of poetic material within the lines:

here is a space again,
the scone rising
to the tick of two clocks.

It also removes the unwanted impression that 'again' refers to 'the scone rising' rather than the space.

Although the final verse paragraph sounds very well, it's far less accomplished. The word 'love' gives ardency to the 'tinsmith's scoop,' rather than receiving illumination and fresh insights from the tinsmith's scoop. Reflection - not in the least cold, clinical reflection - shows that the simile is forced, in fact, that there's no significant linkage between love and a tinsmith's scoop. 'In the meal-bin' is far more justifiable than 'in the yard' and 'by the window,' poetically inert specifications of place. The scoop belongs with the meal-bin, after all, but 'in the meal-bin' ends the poem quite slackly. There are many other poems of his with slack endings, which have to be distinguished from quiet and undemonstrative but effective endings. In general, how to end a poem poses great problems, just as the final movement posed great problems even to Beethoven. (If any movement of a Beethoven work is comparatively weak, it's most likely to be the final movement.)

2 The Seed Cutters

This isn't nearly as important a poem as 'Sunlight.' The strong lines are the opening

They seem hundreds of years away. Breughel,
You'll know them if I can get them true,

and

They are taking their time. Each sharp knife goes
lazily halving each root that falls apart
In the palm of the hand: a milky gleam,
And, at the centre, a dark watermark.

Although 'goes' is weak and redundant, if the second sentence is amalgamated with the first. A line ending is the opportunity for a degree of decisiveness and incisiveness, or for a significant transition to the next line. Better:

They are taking their time, each sharp knife
lazily halving each root that falls apart

As for the other lines, doubts accumulate, niggling matters of fact and accuracy.

They kneel under the hedge in a half-circle

but although people can kneel under trees, they can't kneel under a hedge, only very close to a hedge.

I'm confident that despite any reputation Seamus Heaney may have as a countryman and someone with a knowledge of farming, he's lacking in knowledge even of basics and 'The tuck and frill / Of leaf sprout is on the seed potatoes' is further evidence. It's only a long time after seed potatoes are planted that leaves appear.

This is another poem which ends ineffectually, far more ineffectually than its companion poem:

... compose the frieze
With all of us there, our anonymities.

'Under the broom' (broom being the yellow-flowered hedging shrub) refers to the imperative 'compose.' It wouldn't be possible to do that. The lines are obscure and 'anonymities' is a weak abstraction.

Funeral Rites (North)

The use in this poem of what I call time-strata is interesting, effective, even memorable. The linkage of 'time-strata' is with geological strata and the strata which archaeologists uncover when they unearth successive human habitations:

[time-strata] < > [geological strata, archaeological strata]

Time-strata are prominent in Thomas Hardy's 'At Castle Boterel.' The strata concern:

(1) The time when he drives 'to the junction of lane and highway' and he remembers
(2) the time when and and his wife were climbing the road after 'the sturdy pony' 'sighed and slowed' and they alighted from the carriage.
(3) The earlier generations who climbed the same road.
(4) Primeval times: 'Primeval rocks form the road's steep border.'

The time-strata in 'Funeral Rites' are the present and the prehistoric. Seamus Heaney moves from present to prehistoric and back again in a natural and assured way.

The present in Section I is concerned with funerals and the description is very accomplished, except for the intrusion of 'the black glacier:'

... the black glacier
of each funeral
pushed away.

I comment in the section The meaningless-pointless-grotesque concrete 'he has a thing about those massive rivers of ice, white, more or less, flowing, but very, very slowly, called glaciers. In his work they become black, are easily moved or speeded up. This might work in a surrealist poem, but not in this traditional poetry.'

The prehistoric time-stratum makes its appearance in Section II, which begins,

Now as news comes in
of each neighbourly murder
we pine for ceremony,
customary rhythms:

the temperate footsteps
of a cortège, winding past
each blinded home.
I would restore

the great chambers of Boyne,
prepare a sepulchre
under the cupmarked stones.
Out of side-streets and by-roads

The opening of this second section, though continuing the theme of death in Section I, marks a new dimension: sectarian murders. 'Now as news comes in' would be slack, undistinguished writing, taken out of context. Here, its ordinariness is completely in harmony with the ordinariness of 'neighbourly,' in the next line - but this is in conjunction with 'murder,' and so forms a marked, a poetically superb, oxymoron. The note of moderate ordinariness is resumed, with the words 'customary' and 'temperate' and the slow pace of 'winding past,' until the further shock of 'blinded.'

This brings us to the transition to the second time-stratum. The line 'I would restore' falls at the end of a stanza, separated from the next stanza by significant space. I criticize Seamus Heaney's failures in stanza enjambment. He fails to make use of the opportunities of stanza enjambment in this poem as well, but his use of the opportunities in two places is noteworthy, perhaps more than noteworthy, momentous, except that the slightly humdrum tone here is a {restriction} on artistic success.

The line

I would restore

arouses our curiosity and expectation: what would he restore? But it's too humdrum. After the significant pause between the verse paragraphs, we find that it's

the great chambers of Boyne,

which is a phrase which derives its power not so much from the poet as from its own intrinsic sound and associations. But 'the great chambers of Boyne,' like the word 'sepulchre' in the next line, form a very effective contrast, for all that, with low-key ways of marking death, even violent sectarian death - at least in terms of outward monuments. Suddenly, we are plunged into a world of archaic, dramatic, massive, unfamiliar monuments. It's a pity that the line

under the cupmarked stones.

diminishes rather than intensifies the effect. The sepulchre is made up of the stones rather than lying under them, so that this is yet another example of his inaccurate language, and 'cupmarked' will require a visit to a very comprehensive dictionary or the internet for most readers. It refers to a form of prehistoric art.

There's an abrupt, effective transition back to the present of the poem with

Out of the side-streets and by-roads

and a little later the second effective use of stanza enjambment (although not nearly so effective as the first):

... the muffled drumming

of ten thousand engines.

Here, 'drumming' has ready associations for anyone familiar with the ways of Northern Ireland: the Protestant parades, whose sound-world is dominated by flutes and drums (although the note of the Lambeg drum isn't at all muffled.)

imagining our slow triumph
towards the mounds.

is a transition back to the prehistoric time-stratum which is fairly ineffective but what comes next is much stronger. The procession compared with a serpent, the procession dragging its tail whilst the head enters 'the megalithic doorway' is memorable.

Section III isn't at all memorable, although the first verse paragraph is better:

When they have put the stone
back in its mouth
we will drive north again
past Strang and Carling fjords,

The rest is routine, in different ways, 'the cud of memory / allayed for once' 'arbitration / of the feud placated' and the uninteresting posthumous experiences of Gunnar:

Men said that he was chanting
verses about honour

It seems there were four lights burning in his chamber, but the exact number is completely unimportant.

Heather O' Donoghue gives background information about Gunnar in her useful and interesting essay 'Heaney, Beowulf and the Medieval Literature of the North' ('The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney.') The mourners imagine 'a scene from the Old Norse Njáls saga, in which the dead hero, Gunnarr Hámundarson, is seen chanting verses inside his burial mound, and 'even the saga's detail that Gunnarr had 'turned round to face the moon' is echoed in the poem's conclusion: '... he turned / with a joyful face / to look at the moon.' But this is only background information, irrelevant to the artistic success or otherwise of this section of the poet. Reading an Old Norse Saga and using a near quotation from an Old Norse Saga are obviously no guarantee of complete or partial artistic success.

Heather O' Donoghue quotes Nicholas McGuinn's comment, 'the final section of this poem makes it the most positive and life-affirming work in North'. ('Seamus Heaney: a Student's Guide to 'Selected Poems 1965 - 1975') This is criticism of an abysmal standard. 'Positive' is very often used as a term of approval by people with no critical capacities whatsoever, to commend works of facile uplift, stories that end happily, comfortable and comforting plays. Works which reflect the harshness to be found in reality are presumably 'negative.' 'Life-affirming' is a term just as characteristic of such people. Even on its own terms, granting some residual meaning to these words, the comment is bewildering. Gunnar's face is described as 'joyful,' agreed, but he is 'dead by violence // and unavenged.'

In his Introduction to The Cambridge Companion, Bernard O' Donoghue (not generally an adequate critic, at least of Seamus Heaney) writes that 'The Spirit Level' has 'notably positive qualities' despite 'the power of some of the poems.' 'In the volume's finest poem 'Keeping Going ... two tragic events, understated as they are, dominate the poem ... but the poem's title, and its conclusion, manages to win an optimistic message from the tragedy.' If simple-minded and optimistic 'messages' are all that he has in mind, then a suitable title is the easiest way to achieve it. Call a poem about mass killing 'Renewed Life,' for example. Bernard O' Donoghue mentions an optimistic conclusion as well. 'They all lived happily ever after' is one possibility, but if a poet can come up with something more individual, all the better.

North (North)

I respond to the opening lines with excitement and anticipation:

I returned to a long strand,
the hammered curve of a bay,

When I lived in Northern Ireland, at Portstewart on the North coast, I lived the life of a conscious exile from England, but when I returned to Northern Ireland for the first of many visits, after many years, seeing once more the long strand of Portstewart excited me very much. Which bay and which strand Seamus Heaney had in mind is unclear but the 'hammered curve' is eloquent, the power of nature bending the bay like the imagined iron bar in Ted Hughes' poem 'Wind:'

The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly ...

But I think 'the hammered curve of a bay' is finer.

The power of the Atlantic thundering and the power of the gales are what hammer the bay. (In my memory I add to the bay of Portstewart memories of places where the Atlantic is usually harsher in its impact on the land, such as Bloody Foreland in County Donegal.)

Seamus Heaney relates that he

... found only the secular
powers of the Atlantic thundering.

This is good but oddly deflating, unnecessarily deflating in its use of 'only.' There was surely a case for intensification of what was already intense, not for reduction of intensity. 'Secular' has a rightness, even though the associations of the word for most people, the opposite of 'sacred,' have to be consciously put aside. The intended meaning here is almost certainly 'lasting for a long time.' This is one instance when sound and meaning can be allowed to be very unequal. 'just' would be better than 'only,' less limiting, with the ambiguity of 'just' meaning 'appropriate' as well as 'only.' It would also give a sequence of monosyllables before the object of 'found,' with all its polysyllables, 'the secular / powers of the Atlantic thundering.' 'Power' would be better than 'powers:' the plural disperses the ocean's power to an extent. This power would still have allowed the poet to prepare for his real subject, 'those fabulous raiders.'

Seamus Heaney has a long-standing interest in the poetry of Mandelstam. At the time of writing, he may well have known, or even had in mind, these lines of Mandelstam:

The sea, and Homer - all is moved for love.
To which shall I listen? And now Homer's silent,
And the black declaiming sea roars up my bed,
Reaches my pillow with a thunderous crash.

What comes next is very deflating:

I faced the unmagical
invitations of Iceland,
the pathetic colonies
of Greenland ...

The Northern coast of Northern Ireland is evocative of distant countries further to the North - not specifically Iceland or Greenland, but countries further North encountered after distant voyages. 'Unmagical' is good - Iceland fails to stir the imagination of the poet but 'unmagical' doesn't altogether dispense with the associations of 'magical' despite being a negation - but 'pathetic' could hardly be worse in taking away the high emotion produced by the opening lines. The deflation here and earlier, when attention was deflected from the power of the Atlantic, is intended to make the contrast overwhelming when the reader comes upon this:

... suddenly

those fabulous raiders,
those lying in Orkney and Dublin
measured against
their long swords rusting,

Excitement is restored, but for me only partly, after this deflation. Emotion which had remained more intense from the beginning of the poem might have been made still more intense, almost unbearably intense. These raiders voyaged over the wild Atlantic, not the Mediterranean, so that it was important not to limit the Atlantic by the earlier use of 'only.'

After this, yet again there's deflation, and this time its effect lasts until the end of the poem. All of it is routine, but these are some specific faults.

'Viking Dublin,' also in 'North' has 'a swimming nostril.' This poem has 'The longship's swimming tongue' and it's no more successful. See my comments on the meaningless-pointless-grotesque concrete in his poetry.

Compose in darkness.
Expect aurora borealis
in the long foray
but no cascade of light.

Here, the factors of 'darkness' include the darkness of ignorance, which can't be intended but is carried over just the same. The advice to 'compose in darkness' is pointless, but darkness is simply in preparation for what needs darkness to appear, the aurora borealis. This, one of the most magnificent of all natural spectacles, it would surely be wildly presumptuous to expect, as an equivalent insight or revelation. The aurora borealis is a curtain rather than a cascade of light, but he isn't excluding a cascade of light because the aurora borealis is far more like a curtain than a cascade. In fact, this is simply confused writing.

The poem isn't improved by Seamus Heaney having ransacked the dictionary, or his very wide vocabulary, for 'the bleb of the icicle.' This is sound divorced from meaning. 'bleb' isn't in the vocabulary of most readers and the meaning isn't made clear by the context. The word means a blister on the skin or a small air bubble. The second meaning is the appropriate one, although the other factor is distracting here - but anyone looking closely at ice realizes that there are innumerable tiny bubbles in the ice, not just one, so that 'bleb' is faulty. The word's main function is to be superficially impressive. It does give local colour, but here an isolated splash of local colour can't lift lines which are drab. In general, colouring by obscure words is difficult to achieve successfully in poetry. The 'thawed streams' amount to a lapse in simple accuracy, the climate of Orkney and Dublin making the freezing of streams completely implausible, then as well as now. Lines such as

exhaustions nominated peace,
memory incubating the spilled blood.

may not defy the ingenuity of analysts determined to believe that Seamus Heaney could never write rubbish, but I think that they can exhaust the patience of very receptive readers. 'North,' this title poem, is in general an intense disappointment after the first three stanzas.

The Grauballe Man (North)

This page is entitled 'Criticism of Seamus Heaney's 'The Grauballe Man' and other poems' but 'The Grauballe Man' isn't a representative poem of Seamus Heaney's. If time allows, then a reading of many of the other sections on this page, along with this one, and my other pages on Seamus Heaney, will give a much better idea of Seamus Heaney's strengths, limitations and flaws, as I see them.

'The Grauballe Man' ('North') is magnificent. In this case, I share Helen Vendler's admiration for this poem, very much so. She's right to claim that 'The Grauballe Man' reveals 'Heaney's gift for stunningly exact description better than any other poem in North.' In her discussion of 'The Grauballe Man,' Helen Vendler's enthusiasm - passion - are very much to her credit, but she doesn't show here and in the book as a whole any consistent abilities in close reading. She observes many things, but misses far too much. In fact, even so successful a poem as 'The Grauballe Man' has marked contrasts of success. Of these, Helen Vendler is obviously oblivious.

The poem begins,

As if he had been poured
in tar, he lies
on a pillow of turf
and seems to weep

the black river of himself.

Line enjambment is used very successfully here. At the end of the first line, with 'poured,' we wonder for a moment, 'what was poured?' The tar is viscous but it can be poured. But in itself, as a unit in the poem, the line 'in tar, he lies' is meagre. It lacks scale.

In the third line, 'pillow of turf' illustrates Seamus Heaney's gifts in poetic imagery and his weakness in poetic thought. To make turf into a pillow is wonderful, but for all that, 'pillow' isn't well chosen. The whole body lies on a mattress, only the head lies on a pillow, but the whole of the Grauballe Man is described as lying on this 'pillow.'

I'm not enthusiastic about Seamus Heaney's uses of self-reference, such as this from 'Station Island,' 'Often I was dogs on my own track / Of blood on wet grass that I could have licked,' described for some reason as 'perhaps Heaney's most visceral, and visibly incorporative, self-inwoven simile' by Guinn Batten in 'Heaney's Wordsworth and the Poetics of Displacement,' ('The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney.') Here, there's 'weep / the black river of himself.' 'Weep' is emotionally strong, but otherwise lacks the scale for linkage with the massive river, the fault very common in his poetry: see also my discussion of his faulty concrete language. The disproportion is compounded by the fact that the 'river' follows the very significant pause between verse paragraphs. 'to weep...' what? The massive river, described as 'black' but not in conflict with the other colours of this poem, brown, the colour of peat, rust and red. 'black' can be interpreted as referring, powerfully, to inner realities.

The next lines seem to me completely successful. The short lines are simple but have majestic scale, the lines unified by the gentle insistence of alliteration, the linkage of the 'b' sound in 'bog,' 'ball' and 'basalt.'

The grain of his wrists
is like bog oak,
the ball of his heel

like a basalt egg.

The lines of this third verse-paragraph and the fourth verse-paragraph are individually very impressive and impressive cumulatively, except that the piling up of very different allusions leads to The Grauballe Man becoming too much of a hybrid: 'swan's foot,' 'swamp root,' ridge...of a mussel,' 'an eel.'

The fifth verse paragraph is beyond praise. Apart from the wonderful description - but far more than description, reconstruction at a very high imaginative level - it has two surprises, or shocks. 'The head lifts,' a movement not in the still body but in the mind of the viewer and reader, and 'his slashed throat,' a sudden irruption of human violence into the natural world of the poem.

The poem is at great {distance} from optical realism. The poem is descriptive only in a limited sense. The photograph at the top of this page shows an almost photogenic Grauballe Man. Not so this view of his face.

The next lines sound superb, the powerful (but not perfect) diction of each pair of lines made even more effective by the parallelism of the lines and wording, the two questions, the two words 'corpse' and 'body' and the two words 'cast' and 'repose':

Who will say 'corpse'
to his vivid cast?
Who will say 'body'
to his opaque repose?

But the response of 'vivid cast' is contradicted by the simultaneous response of opaque repose.

Seamus Heaney has the reputation for many people of being a direct, straightforward poet but I think that the reality is more complex and less reassuring. I think that in these lines he distorts. Poetry which is intended to be unrealistic can't be criticized, usually, for being unrealistic. Poetry which is intended to distort, such as expressionist poetry, can't be criticized, usually, for distorting. In these lines, he distorts not through lack of skill or actual incompetence (which explain many of his mistakes) but by following, single-mindedly, almost fanatically, an obsession. As often with the obsessions of poets, this had artistic benefits - in this case, a wonderful poem - and ruinous costs, in this case, a {restriction} of human sympathy, all-too-obvious {substitution}. He gave too much attention to photographs of bodies in bogs. 'It was through P. V. Globb's celebrated book The Bog People, with its extraordinary photographs of the excavated bodies, that Heaney first encountered these bog bodies.' (Heather O' Donoghue, 'Heaney, Beowulf and the Medieval Literature of the North,' in the 'Cambridge Companion.)

Poetry is made up of words but should give us mind - above all human mind, although some poetry gives us animal mind, some 'divine mind,' and some, as with Wordsworth, a mind in nature. Many of Seamus Heaney's poems give a sense of a presence or power within nature, too, not pantheistic, but all the better for not being pantheistic, and a reason for valuing these poems highly.

In this poem, we shouldn't expect to find mind in the Grauballe Man, but this is for obvious reasons. In attending to a body, it's the absence any longer of mind which is the predominant, bleak, inescapable feeling. By asking his explicit questions, Seamus Heaney confuses vivid appearance - which he's able to render superbly - with the completely illegitimate: the Grauballe Man still has mind. See also my response to the mummified bodies at an exhibition in Mannheim, Germany.

The eighth and ninth verse-paragraph are very accomplished, although the lines 'a mat unlikely,' 'as a foetus's' and 'in a photograph' lack scale. 'I first saw his twisted face // in a photograph' is the giving of information, not poetically effective, but 'twisted' compensates. The adjective is inspired. 'bruised like a forceps baby' is a reminder that Seamus Heaney's poetry at its best is far from being simply 'description,' and that the comparison with an old-fashioned realist painter is unjust. The poetry is a triumph of invention. In its imagery, it puts a sphere of human life, the baby at birth in this case, in close linkage with the The Grauballe Man himself. Seamus Heaney in 'The Grauballe Man' and some of his other poems is writing 'chordally,' to produce poetry of great richness and resonance. (Lines of poetry, like the music for unaccompanied violin in Bach's Partitas and Sonatas, aren't inherently chordal or polyphonic. Bach gave chords to the violin and the strong impression of polyphony, so that often the one line has the richness of other implied lines.)

The transition from the majestic and serene

but now he lies
perfected in my memory

to the everyday detail

down to the red horn
of his nails,

is an unsuccessful use of abruptness. 'of his nails' is yet another line lacking in scale, the usual weakness when Seamus Heaney begins a line with 'of.' The words 'down to' are insignificant and banal.

Compare a very successful use of 'red' contrasted with white (and beef contrasted with string) in a much later poem, 'The Nod,' in 'District and Circle,' and a reminder of Seamus Heaney's painterly gifts. (In other respects these lines, and the poem as a whole, are surely unsuccessful.)

Saturday evenings we would stand in line
in Loudan's butcher shop. Red beef, white string,

'The Grauballe Man' is routine, Parnassian in its last two verse paragraphs, I think: 'beauty' and 'atrocity' are two potentially rich words but they act as ineffective abstractions here. If they are on the two sides of the scales, how is anyone or anything to be 'hung' with them? On which side of the scales?

In the closing verse paragraph, 'actual' in 'with the actual weight' surely belongs with the well-known misuses of 'literally.'

'each hooded victim / slashed and dumped' is good, but the slashed here isn't nearly as good as the incomparably more vivid 'slashed' in the earlier 'above the vent / of his slashed throat'

This may be too severe, but to me, 'and dumped' seems almost an afterthought and an anti-climax, almost as if the poem has been suddenly abandoned ('dumped.')

Although Seamus Heaney's achievement in this poem is a triumph of invention rather than realism, description of what he saw, or poetry-painting, an equivalent for this poem in painting can be imagined. It would be a painting in oils, not watercolours, a very impressive painting mostly, but still a 'flat' painting, for all that, a painting which makes no use of the possibilities in the picture plane of perspective. E M Forster, in 'Aspects of the Novel,' introduces the distinction between 'flat' and 'round' characters. I think of a distinction between 'flat' and 'perspective' poetry. Perspective poetry gives readers the experience of different planes, resonance on a wider scale than the local resonance of the forceps baby, the vistas extending far beyond the 'poetry plane,' whereas Seamus Heaney's effects are within the poetry plane.

I think that Andrew Waterman was correct in his claim that human life isn't 'about' such things as the bog people. What the 'bog poems' tell us about human life and mortality is limited - again, restricted to the poetry plane. The bog poems, even a poem as impressive as 'The Grauballe Man,' give us no significant insights into either human consciousness or the void - according to one important strand in human reflection - which is death.

Exposure (North)

This is an important poem in Seamus Heaney's work. In much of his poetry, he's an observer and recorder, responding to people and places, nature and events, almost as if he had no direct means of expressing the self, apart from mentions of his pleasure in observing and recording. In his poetry there's no trace of a very complex self or a very troubled self, one with crushing disappointments, disillusionment, experience of fragmentariness, the limitations of life. There are glimpses, no more, of such feelings. In 'The Ministry of Fear' ('North'), of his time at St Columb's College, there's

...In the first week
I was so homesick I couldn't even eat
The biscuits left to sweeten my exile.

'The Harvest Bow' ('Field Work') has

Me with the fishing rod, already homesick
For the big lift of these evenings...

People whose life is generally unclouded, optimistic to a fault, can be troubled by a funeral or by personal experience of violence, but this isn't to say that they have the tragic sense of life or that they have looked into the void or that their experiences have been so shattering and bitter as to give rise to profound reflection. (If they had been, they would no longer be optimistic to a fault.) Seamus Heaney hasn't shown in the least that he's a poetic Dostoevsky. His poems aren't unclouded, obviously, but in their insight into suffering they are products of relative normality, a tame normality, despite the appearance of the Troubles in some of them.

Rand Brandes, in 'Seamus Heaney's Working Titles,' ('The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney') writes 'An underlying sense of tragedy informs much of Heaney's work; even in the most quotidian of poems one feels the presence of Anglo-Saxon doom and Greek catastrophe in the disappointments and disillusionments.' This is a product of the word-sphere and very much wide of the mark.

It would be impossible to apply to any of Seamus Heaney's poems the words of Kornei Chukovsky in connection with Dostoevsky's 'Notes from Underground,' and the failure of Constance Garnett's translation to do justice to the book: 'In reading the original, who does not feel the convulsions, the nervous trembling of Dostoevsky's style? It is expressed in convulsions of syntax, in a frenzied and somehow piercing diction where malicious irony is mixed with sorrow and despair.' (Quoted in the excellent piece by Orlando Figes, 'Tolstoy's Real Hero.') Of course, Dostoevsky's experiences were far more extreme than Seamus Heaney's. Dostoevsky was accused of plotting against the Tsar and led out to execution but pardoned, and sent to exile in Siberia.

It's disappointing that the critic James Wood (British born but resident in the Land of the Lethal Injection) should write this, under the title 'Scruples,' in the London Review of Books (Volume 18, No. 2), in a review of Seamus Heaney's 'The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures' and 'The Spirit Level': 'Heaney’s poetry is loaded with anxiety and self-tormented power. At times this is truly powerful, and at other times merely self-tormented. But this is nevertheless the grimace of a major poet.' I find his fiction reviewing nearly always interesting but this again belongs to the word-sphere, with no basis in reality. (The strengths and limitations of his work are very well discussed by William Deresiewicz in his How Wood Works: the Riches and Limits of James Wood.)

'Exposure' contains no remarkable revelations. If Seamus Heaney does after all have a very complex and interesting self, it's still well concealed in this poem, but the traces of sadness in the poem are endearing and emerge naturally and very effectively from the reflections on nature - although this is yet another poem which is flawed, as if after writing it in an inspired state he saw no need for revision and did nothing else but have it published, flaws and all. As a variant of the well-known glib phrase, 'After inspiration, perspiration!'

How to begin a poem is surely a topic well worth considering. In music, the poles are beginning in a striking or very powerful way, as with the opening of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony or Fifth Symphony, or starting in a quiet and understated way, as with the opening of his Pastoral Symphony.

'Exposure' begins

It is December in Wicklow:

The poem begins in a quiet and understated way, a good opening, I think. 'December' has associations - some knowledge of Irish winters is helpful, associations which are important in the poem. There are three weak accents before the strong accent on the second syllable of 'December.' A very wide ((survey)) of poem openings shows the rarity of an opening which delays for so long the first strong accent of the poem. The accents in the first two bars of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony - the theme played by the first violins - are the same as in the first line of 'Exposure:'

The rhythm of the first stanza is effective, unlike the flaccid rhythm usual in his poetry:

It is December in Wicklow:
Alders dripping, birches
Inheriting the last light,
The ash tree cold to look at.

This is very evocative too. Thought isn't perfectly co-ordinated with the portrayal of atmosphere, though. As the alders, birches and ash tree are exposed to the same rain, the same fading light and the same cold, it's arbitrary that it should be the alders that are dripping, the birches inheriting the last light and the ash tree cold to look at.

The Seventeenth century gave us a view of the universe which is very compelling and which offers great scope to the imagination - of the universe as a vast, predictable mechanism. The predictability of comets has displaced any Shakespearean notion of them as portenders of evil. Seamus Heaney has

A comet that was lost
Should be visible at sunset,
Those million tons of light...

Seamus Heaney's comet isn't at all majestic and impressive, a piece of lost property but one which 'should' be found again, with any luck. It conveys neither the Shakespearean menace nor the bleakness of Pascal's infinite spaces. Poets have no responsibility to convey detailed and accurate scientific knowledge but should be expected to use language responsibly, including scientific language. There are many readers of the poem who will know that measuring the light in millions of tons is ridiculous in this poem. The closing line of the poem, which has the comet 'pulsing' and pulsing like a rose, dispenses with scientific reality for no gain at all in poetic power. This is a line with nothing to offer. To end a poem with quiet understatement is one thing, to end it half-heartedly, pretentiously and erroneously is another.

The line

If I could come on meteorite!

should have been revised / excised. It forms a very poor progression to the strong

Instead I walk through damp leaves,
Husks, the spent flukes of autumn,

although 'spent' is arguably superfluous.

The next stanza sounds good but has no clear meaning at all, unless there is some allusion from Irish history or mythology or some other source which explains it.

Imagining a hero
On some muddy compound,
His gift like a slingstone
Whirled for the desperate.

The line

How did I end up like this?

sounds low-key, but in the context of Seamus Heaney's poetry it's very prominent - almost unprecedented in its note of authentic doubt and weariness.

The 'anvil brains of some who hate me ' is a declaration that he can be less than universally liked - unique in his poetry, I think. 'Anvil' is surely the meaningless concrete. The associations of 'anvil' are usually to do with being struck by a hammer. If this is intended here, who is doing the striking?

Rain comes down through the alders

is again arbitrary in its mention of alders and not birches or the ash tree.

He is

An inner émigré, grown long-haired
And thoughtful...

...feeling
Every wind that blows;

Who, blowing up these sparks
For their meagre heat...

Even if these lines are made less effective by the proximity of inferior lines and part-lines, they are eloquent.

The Strand at Lough Beg (Field Work)

This is the best of Seamus Heaney's poems on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, I think. The poem is about the leaving behind of the everyday world of lights glowing and shining in the dark, about climbing and entering a bare and stark world, one of tragic intensity, the darkness broken by the stars, the lights of the car and the lights of those who intend to kill the driver. The narrative is compressed but conceals its compression. In Sophocles' 'Oedipus the King,' the narrative of the questions and answers leads to Oedipus' tragic discovery that he had killed his father. Here, the compressed, flawed narrative leads to the discovery of the body of Colum McCartney.

I only wish that in this poem, one I admire so much, Seamus Heaney had been able to avoid his recurrent faults and tendencies - inaccuracy of language, misjudged wording, confused imagery, the intrusion of mythological and other allusions which add nothing and take away so much of the force of the poem. As almost always in his poetry, the achievement is fragmentary. The fragments are poignant and powerful, as fragments so often are, they fuse in the mind into a poignant and powerful whole - but this fusion is a favourable distortion of the actual poem.

The tragic setting is reached with the fifth line,

Along that road, a high, bare pilgrim's track

(but 'track' and 'road,' wrongly identified here, are distinct: a track is much rougher than a road). The previous lines prepare the way, the high track reached by leaving the glow of lights and lamps and then climbing the hills. This is a stark and memorable picture but its impact is reduced. The 'lonely streetlamps among fields' in the second line can be faulted. Fields can be very close to country roads but 'streets' generally have an urban setting, apart from the long Roman roads such as 'Watling Street.' (No poem could ever allude to Roman roads in Ireland.) Fields can be very close to the streets on the outskirts of a town or city, but the image of streetlamps among fields is an incongruous one.

The third and fourth lines,

You climbed the hills towards Newtownhamilton
past the Fews Forest, out beneath the stars -

are fairly prosaic giving of information, the phrase 'out beneath the stars' just as much as what comes before, despite any of the associations of 'stars,' but these fairly prosaic lines begin the quiet building of dramatic intensity, after the glow of filling stations and lamps have been left behind. They're far superior to these lines:

Where Sweeney fled before the bloodied heads,
Goat-beards and dogs' eyes in a demon pack
Blazing out of the ground, snapping and squealing.

This is vivid, routinely vivid, too vivid. After the quiet and the building of dramatic tension, like a false alarm the lines anticipate, spoil the effect of, disrupt - 'Blazing' is particularly faulty - the intended climax of this part of the poem, the first ominous event in the unfolding tragedy, and far more important than the mythology and literary allusion of 'Sweeney fled ...'

What blazed ahead of you? A faked road block?
The red lamp swung, the sudden brakes and stalling
Engine, voices, heads hooded and the cold-nosed gun?

Sweeney is the Ulster poet who appears in the medieval Irish poem Buile Suibhne. He's a distraction here. So are the demon pack, who appear 'out of the ground,' not awkward to the medieval mind, which viewed hell as literally underground, but more than awkward in a contemporary poem. This is Seamus Heaney as archaic allusionist. The demon pack is no more effective and convincing than the avenging furies from Greek mythology who pursue Harry in T S Eliot's 'The Family Reunion.'

To return to the important lines, beginning with 'What blazed ahead of you? A faked road block?' some inaccuracy of language is the only fault. This was a real road block, not a faked road block: the driver was prevented from driving on. It was the reason for stopping the driver that was faked. These were paramilitaries, not the security forces who operated official road blocks.

Mystery and uncertainty aren't prominent in the poetry of Seamus Heaney, but they are here. We'll never know the exact circumstances of Colum McCartney's murder. It may have been the paramilitary roadblock, or it may have been this:

Or in your driving mirror, tailing headlights
That pulled out suddenly and flagged you down
Where you weren't known and far from what you knew:

Both possibilities, the lights in front and the lights behind, are lights on the dramatic stage of an ominous and then terrifying night.

The lines about duck shooting are an anticipation of the shooting of Colum McCartney:

But still were scared to find spent cartridges,
Acrid, brassy, genital, ejected,

The first line here, with its 'scared' and 'spent' is beyond praise. In the second line, only 'Acrid' should have stayed after revision: a superb choice of word. Cartridges are made of brass, 'brassy' means 'insolent,' but whether the reference is to insolence or the metal used, the associations are too commonplace to follow 'scared' and diminish its effect. 'Genital' disrupts the effect far more - a dismal choice of word - and 'ejected' is redundant after 'spent' cartridges.

The lines from 'For you and yours and yours and mine' to 'the burial ground,' which end the second verse-paragraph, are poor, Parnassian: 'an old language of conspirators,' for example, and 'Slow arbitrators of the burial ground' are useless in maintaining dramatic tension.

Not so the unexpected peacefulness of

Across that strand of yours the cattle graze
Up to their bellies in an early mist

and the 'unbewildered gaze' of the cattle'

By that time, dawn or early morning, no doubt, the murder has already taken place. All that remains is the discovery of the victim. The setting is atmospheric, in superb and harrowing contrast with the description of the victim,

... to find you on your knees
With blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes,

But these lines are the only good lines in a closing verse paragraph of sixteen lines. (Neil Corcoran claims that the last ten lines are 'the most moving Heaney has written.') The whole scene is imagined, the imagined actions are contrived and the references are contrived. One reference is to gathering up 'cold handfuls of the dew / To wash you, cousin.' This refers to the occasion in Dante's 'Purgatorio' when Virgil washes the grime of Hell from Dante's face with dew. The other reference is to 'green scapulars.' Scapulars are part of the habit - clothes - worn by members of some Roman Catholic religious orders.

The demands made of the reader here are excessive. Without knowledge of the references, the lines will seem puzzling, a feeling which makes impossible deep appreciation. A writer is entitled to assume that a reader has knowledge of the cultural heritage which underlies a contemporary poem, but not a detailed or exhaustive knowledge. Even readers who are familiar with Dante's Inferno often have no knowledge of the Purgatorio or Paradiso, and even readers who have a knowledge of Roman Catholicism shouldn't be assumed to have a detailed knowledge of the clothes of Catholic religious orders.

Casualty (Field Work)

Seamus Heaney's 'Casualty' is about a man who was 'blown to bits' in an explosion. Although 'Casualty' is about violence and the Troubles in Northern Ireland, in part, I think that the strength of this poem is completely in characterization. Seamus Heaney's strengths in vivid natural description have deflected attention from some of his other strengths, such as characterization, although characterization of a fairly simple kind.

Characterization is an important factor in most ((surveys)) of artistic success in drama and prose fiction. Most ((surveys)) of artistic success in poetry aren't concerned with it. To give just one example, the 'Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics' has no entry for characterization. A degree of specialization has been assumed. Shakespeare was a poet, stronger in characterization than any poet before or after his time, but primarily a dramatic poet, not the poet of the sonnets. It's assumed that non-dramatic poets shouldn't be expected to show any particular strength in characterization.

The characterization here and in other places, such as Section III of 'The Other Side,' ('Wintering Out') is vivid and convincing but 'flat' , not 'round,' to use the distinction of E M Forster in 'Aspects of the Novel:' Chapter 4, 'People (continued).' The characters of Seamus Heaney have no real complexity.

Not all of the poem is at a high artistic level. In sections I and II I think that the verse paragraph beginning with

But he would not be held
At home by his own crowd

is Parnassian. But almost everything up to then is wonderful - forgetting any quibbles, everything up to then is wonderful - and what follows in section II is wonderful too:

He had gone miles away
For he drank like a fish
Nightly, naturally
Swimming towards the lure
Of warm lit-up places,

The very short line 'Nightly, naturally' has ample scale - a very successful line. 'lure' is intensely vivid. There are revealing contrasts between this warm lit-up place and Van Gogh's 'The All-night Café' in Arles. Van Gogh wrote, 'In my painting of the 'All-Night Café I've tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, become crazy and criminal. Through the contrast of delicate pink, blood red and dark red, of mild Louis-XV and Veronese green against the yellow-green and stark blue-green tones - all this in an atmosphere like the devil's inferno and pale sulphurous yellow ... I've tried to convey the sinister power of such a place.'

This belongs to the word-sphere, not the sphere of the painting. In general, trust the painter's or the writer's work, rather than what the painter or writer has to say about the work. The painting shows people who are defeated or passive in an alienating place which does offer light and a little comfort, preferable, obviously, to the dark and comfortless world outside the café.

Seamus Heaney's 'warm lit-up places' have genuine cheer, are much warmer and more welcoming, so that the bleakness of what has come before

He was blown to bits
Out drinking in a curfew
Others obeyed...

and what follows at the beginning of Section III, the pathos of

I missed his funeral

form an effective contrast.

The rest of Section III is disappointing, deeply disappointing. Seamus Heaney's weakness in revision is obvious here. Pruning, like the pruning which makes a plant so much more productive or beautiful, would have been very beneficial. But even the unpruned poem, in all its tangled strength and weakness, is impressive.

The rhyme scheme of Section I of the poem is instructive - regular, but with seemingly random unrhymed lines. (Was Seamus Heaney unable to think of rhymes for all the lines, or can sympathetic commentators find some 'deeper' explanation?)

Showing unrhymed lines by ! the scheme is, for the first 24 lines:

abab c!c! efef ghgh ijij !k!k

Compare Digging, which has the 'rhyme scheme' aa bbb !!!! ... with unrhymed lines to the end of the poem, except that the 17th line rhymes with the 21st and the 29th line rhymes with the 1st.

Glanmore Sonnets VIII (Field Work)

This is the best of the 'Glanmore Sonnets' by far, a superb poem. It begins,

Thunderlight on the split logs: big raindrops
At body heat and lush with omen
Spattering dark on the hatchet iron.

'Thunderlight' compresses sound and light, thunder and lightning, the gap between thunder and lighting, the big raindrops convey omen, the ominous feeling that a storm is about to break when here, by compression, the storm has already broken, the lightning rapidly alternates with darkness, when the raindrops spatter dark, the lightning captures for a split second the split logs, split not by a hatchet made of iron but the compressed 'hatchet iron.'

Which is succeeded abruptly by the jerky steps of the magpie, inspecting the horse asleep, motion and lack of motion not compressed but close in their contrast. 'dew on armour and carrion' sounds like a modern version of the anonymous poem about a dead knight, 'The twa Corbies.' The 'dew' suggests a morning after the bloody combat, when nature had resumed its course after human violence.

'How deep into the woodpile sat the toad?' is far more abrupt. How is it to be understood? This line, without an immediately obvious meaning, is immensely effective - if only every contemporary poem which has lines without an immediately obvious meaning were as effective.

The lines

Do you remember that pension in Les Landes
Where the old one rocked and rocked and rocked
A mongol in her lap, to little songs?

are another abrupt transition, just as unexpected, just as successful. It would be hard to explain why, but the transitions have a rightness, as much rightness as any of the ones in Eliot's 'The Waste Land.' Will there be any further abrupt transitions? Just one, the sexuality of

Come to me quick, I am upstairs shaking.
My all of you birchwood in lightning.

where 'lightning' is a wonderful, not at all contrived, linkage with the first word of the poem.

The Harvest Bow (Field Work)

This poem isn't a summation of Seamus Heaney's strengths and weaknesses, just one example among many. All the same, I think of it as more than representative. It has a verse-paragraph so devoid of inspiration as to form a glaring contrast with the other verse-paragraphs, which do have flaws of their own, the one beginning,

Hands that aged around ashplants and cane sticks

Here, the spurs are the sharp devices fastened to the feet of the cocks designed to cause death and injury to the competing cocks in cock-fighting - like the 'drawn snare' at the end of the poem not in effective contrast with the gentle tone of the rest of the poem but obtrusive, unexplained, pointlessly contrasting. (The two lines which follow the 'drawn snare' are very poor too: 'Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn / Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.) Although snares do belong to this rural world, cock-fighting is imposed and arbitrary. But the 'snares' are almost as arbitrary, introduced for their superficial aura of menace, without contributing anything to the poem.

The poem has a line in marked contrast with the artistic qualities of the other lines in the verse paragraph it belongs to (these other lines aren't magnificent in artistic quality but the contrast is still very marked - the line is so poor by comparison with the other lines.) This is the line

You implicated the mellowed silence in you

in the verse paragraph

As you plaited the harvest bow
You implicated the mellowed silence in you
In wheat that does not rust
But brightens as it tightens twist by twist
Into a knowable corona,
A throwable love-knot of straw.

Here, 'knowable' and 'throwable' are surely dispensable.

But between the poor first stanza and the last three lines, forgetting such anomalies as the second line of the second stanza ('And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of game cocks') the lines are relaxed but memorable, wonderfully conveying the ease and tenderness of experiences which are ordinary but more than ordinary. They make us temporarily forget any imperfections of the poem. These resemble the human imperfections of a good person:

I see us walk between the railway slopes
Into an evening of long grass and midges,

and

... your stick
Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes

The main fault here, or only fault, which we have to remember after temporarily forgetting, is that this is prose-poetry. 'I see us walk between the railway slopes into an evening of long grass and midges' is poetic but isn't poetry.

Widgeon (Station Island)

'Widgeon' is 'the shortest poem in Station Island, and one of its most perfect,' according to Neil Corcoran.

'Widgeon' after line-removal:

'It had been badly shot. While he was plucking it he found, he says, the voice box like a flute-stop in the broken windpipe - and blew upon it unexpectedly his own small widgeon cries.'

The blowing on the voice box to produce 'his own small widgeon cries' is non-expressive. Compare the expressive, the vastly superior authentic poetry of Wordsworth's boy imitating owls on the shore of Windermere in 'The Prelude.' (Book Fifth, lines 364 - 388, 1850 version, superior to the 1805 version in this passage.) This example is instructive for more than one reason. Only a small proportion of 'The Prelude' is at this poetic level, although some is equally fine or finer. There are vast amounts of routine writing, 'Parnassian,' in 'The Prelude,' as in Wordsworth's poetry as a whole. Parnassian is far more prominent and obtrusive in the later poetry than in the earlier. The proponderance of Parnassian in Seamus Heaney's poetry, particularly his later poetry - critics such as Bernard O' Donoghue claim otherwise - is nothing special.

The passage in which the voice of mountain torrents is heard is this:

... and, when a lengthened pause
Of silence came and baffled his best skill,
Then sometimes, in that silence while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind,
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.

Seamus Heaney quotes these lines in his essay 'The Indefatigable Hoof-Taps' but quotes very inaccurately. The first lines in the 1805 version are different from the 1850 version above,

... And when it chanced
That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill,

Seamus Heaney gives as his version

... And, when there came a pause
Of silence such as baffled his best skill:

He distorts in some of his comments too, so that the 'the voice / Of mountain torrents' and 'the visible scene' are forgotten: 'As he stands open like an eye or an ear, he becomes imprinted with all the melodies and hieroglyphs of the world ...'

As I've observed often, most often on the shores of Windermere or Derwentwater, sound by a lake carries far. In these lines from 'The Prelude,' the imitated sound of the owls is carried far and the 'voice of mountain-torrents' is carried 'far into his heart.' In expressive poetry, what is expressed is carried far. This poem of Seamus Heaney's carries nothing far. It seems confined to the page-plane. 'Carrying far' isn't a criterion of success for all poetry. There are many kinds of poetry - such as hermetic poetry, the poetry of great inwardness, the poetry of interesting complexity of language, the poetry primarily of the page, where carrying far isn't a criterion. But there are poems like 'Widgeon' where carrying far is obviously attempted but fails, and poems of other poets where carrying far is attempted and succeeds.

Neil Corcoran again: 'The bird is 'badly shot', as some of the shades in 'Station Island' have been badly (wickedly, cruelly) shot, in Northern sectarian murders. The primary meaning of 'badly,' meaning 'incompetently' shot (according to the standards of those people who are shooting) is almost certainly the only meaning. This is Neil Corcoran determined to interpret a poem innocent of Northern Irish violence in violent terms. Compare the determination of Helen Vendler in her comments on Digging. Even if there were the secondary meaning claimed, 'wickedly, cruelly,' the primary meaning tends to displace the secondary meaning, since the subject 'bird' is actively present, the sectarian victims at great {distance}. The primary meaning, or only meaning, as I see it, dominates and is non-expressive. It amounts to giving information, without giving any resonance or complexity to the poem.

Station Island VII (Station Island)

Titles can make all the difference to a poem. Not, of course, to the artistic success of the poem, only to something far less important, the attention the poem receives. The Haydn symphonies which have titles, such as the 'Oxford,' 'Surprise,' 'Military,' 'Clock' and 'Drum Roll' have generally received much more attention than such wonderful works as the Symphony No. 88, Symphony No. 97 and Symphony No. 102. If the 'Drum Roll' Symphony were known only as Symphony No. 103, it would probably have received less attention - but it would still be as wonderful.

This poem, known only as 'Station Island VII,' ought to be far better known. By {diversification} being well known can be artistically deserved, or undeserved. This poem should be far better known because, after the opening lines, it's a very good poem. It would be better known if only it had been given a title with individuality.

In his Introduction to 'The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney,' Bernard O' Donoghue writes of 'the Dantesque power and anger ... of the great narrative of William Strathearn who was treacherously gunned down in his shop ... the most fully Dantesque piece Heaney has ever written.' The poem has nothing like 'Dantesque power,' an excessive claim. 'Dantesque power' is something which is distinctive as well as intense and Seamus Heaney doesn't achieve it here. 'Anger' isn't a notably Dantesque emotion. Dante observes torments and the depravities or the unexceptional acts (in our contemporary perspective) which led to the torments with a steady gaze, as if these things couldn't be otherwise, not with any great degree of anger. After the medieval poetry of Dante, poetry moved on. After the achievements of medieval architecture, architecture moved on. Later works of poetry or architecture weren't necessarily superior to the medieval works in artistic quality, but neo- often amounts to derivative- or inferior-.

The opening of 'Stations VII' is hesitant, not in the least a Dantesque vision:

I had come to the edge of the water,
soothed by just looking, idling over it
as if it were a clear barometer

or a mirror, when his reflection
did not appear but I sensed a presence
entering into my concentration

'or a mirror' surely can't be justified. The comparison between reflective water and a mirror is hackneyed. The 'clear barometer' on the other side of the dividing white space is equally inept. It's difficult or impossible to find any merits in the linkage between the two phrases in the two verse paragraphs. Water has been compared with a mirror very often. I doubt if it's been compared to a barometer before this poem, for a very good reason. Everything here is remote from Dante, above all the ineffectual abstraction of 'a presence / entering into my concentration' and the ineffectual rhythm. As frequently (see also Digging) one problem is to do with too many weakly stressed syllables, which adequate revision could have solved very easily. But this would have required talents in rhythm beyond his scope.

The only remotely Dantesque lines in the entire poem occur very soon after these lines:

... And though I was reluctant
I turned to meet his face and the shock

is still in me at what I saw. His brow
was blown open above the eye and blood
had dried on his neck and cheek.

But Dante would never have have allowed the obvious mistake of stating that the 'brow' was blown open 'above' the eye - obviously, a brow is above the eye - or stating that the blood had dried on his neck and cheek whilst we wonder what had happened to the blood obviously left when his brow was blown open.

There follows an extended passage, nothing like anything in Dante, nothing like anything else in the poetry of Seamus Heaney, in which his superb narrative gifts - if only he'd used them more widely - are apparent. None of the lines are memorable in themselves. Their language is ordinary enough. The force of the narrative gives force to ordinary lines.

The narrative flow leads to a victim and the victim slows down and stops the narrative flow. Once the narrative flow is halted and we have more time to observe closely, we perhaps become more attentive to the ordinariness of the language, such as 'an athlete's cleanliness / shining off him ...' and the habitual prosiness, the lack of poetic rhythm:

There was always an athlete's cleanliness
shining off him and except for the ravaged
forehead and the blood, he was still that same
rangy midfielder in a blue jersey ...

In the last line, the victim ' ... trembled like a heatwave and faded.' 'Trembled' suggests someone perhaps feeling cold in a heatwave but certainly not the heatwave itself, which is strong and assertive even when it varies and seems as if it could end. In the tempo of the poem, 'and faded' happens fast. It's a suitable continuation after 'trembled' but the trembling of a heatwave suggests more a slight alteration, not an ending of the heatwave. This last line seems to me confused in its imagery, too confused to count as a successful ending to an intermittently strong poem.

From the Land of the Unspoken
(The Haw Lantern)

There are many poems by Seamus Heaney which will seem very impressive if you read some of the commentators, disappointing or disastrously poor if you read the poems. These commentators have read the poems themselves, of course, but they are negligent, culpably negligent, in overlooking the most blatant faults. This poem is an instructive example.

Neil Corcoran doesn't find any faults in 'From the Land of the Unspoken,' or none he finds serious enough to mention. The poems whose titles begin with 'From,' including this one, have this in common, '... their strict moralism seems very much the air this volume breathes. They are all, indeed, 'dislocated geopolitical phantasmagorias', even if the island of Ireland and the configuration of Northern Ireland seem within hailing distance of their political and topographical nowheres ...' I think it can be demonstrated very easily, by a close examination of the poem, that this is verbiage, perhaps verbiage of a classy kind but verbiage divorced from critical values, verbiage which pays practically no attention to the actual text.

'From the Land of the Unspoken' has as its first verse paragraph

I have heard of a bar of platinum
kept by a logical and talkative nation
as their standard of measurement,
the throne room and the burial chamber
of every calculation and prediction.
I could feel at home inside that metal core
slumbering at the very hub of systems.

In various places, I point out that Seamus Heaney is a very poor reviser of his own work, but no amount of revision could possibly make these abysmal lines into anything resembling even poor poetry. The scientific accuracy is just as unimpressive.

Here, the 'logical and talkative nation' is France (other nations aren't characterized in this maddening way in his poetry, so he never refers to The Republic of Ireland as the 'less logical but even more talkative nation.') He's referring to the platinum bar which was constructed in France when the metre was introduced in France as the unit of length in 1801. By the time he was writing, the metre had long before been adopted as the unit of length in the S.I. system (Système Internationale) and was no longer 'their' standard of length, the standard of France, but the standard of the whole scientific community, and the platinum bar had long before been abandoned as the method of measuring the metre. (In 1960, the metre was defined in terms of the wavelength associated with a particular line in the spectrum of an isotope of krypton.) The platinum bar was only ever the standard of the metre, not the standard of other physical quantities, such as mass and time, so it was never the basis 'of every calculation and prediction' as Seamus Heaney claims. And in any case, there are innumerable calculations and predictions which don't make any reference to physical quantities, such as calculations using numbers only and the prediction that the sun will rise tomorrow. A few moments' thought should have made this obvious.

As for 'the throne room' and the burial chamber' having anything to do with 'every calculation and prediction,' then this is evidence of impaired thought processes, which also allowed him to write, and have published, these references to him 'slumbering' and 'at home' inside the platinum bar of the standard metre - which, again, was only ever a means of measuring one quantity, and which was never 'at the very hub of systems.'

In the second verse-paragraph, Irish history is described as 'a sensation of opaque fidelity,' not a good way of describing such vivid events as The Great Famine, The Easter Rebellion, The Civil War and The Troubles.

The third verse-paragraph offers an opportunity for critical comparison:

After 'we fall in step / but do not altogether come up level,' not poetry at its most sublime or significant, there's

My deepest contact was underground
strap-hanging back to back on a rush-hour train

This, of course, is an anticipation of the underground theme in the poem 'District and Circle' in the volume 'District and Circle.' This may be an anticipation but it's more important to recognize the artistic badness.

The final lines are

Meanwhile, if we miss the sight of a fish
we heard jumping and then see its ripples,
that means one more of us is dying somewhere.

This could be described as either pseudo-profound or truly pointless. The poem ends, not at all resoundingly, with the vagueness of 'somewhere' but the vagueness may even come as a relief after the metrology of the opening.

Clearances 7 (The Haw Lantern)

The 'volta' in a sonnet is the 'turn,' a turn of subject or thought. The turn very often occurs at line 9. In this poem, there's a turn at line 9 of a different kind, from relative artistic success to clear failure. This is line 9:

The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned.

I'm deeply suspicious of this line, I hope mistakenly. It seems contrived, fictional, fake, not a moving rendering of actual events.

The poem is concerned with the death of Seamus Heaney's mother, 'the last minutes' and the moment of death. The death was fully expected, inevitable. I find it almost impossible to believe that in 'the last minutes', there was any searching for a pulsebeat at all, any attempt to verify that life was still there. The circumstances were different in the case of the accident described by Robert Frost in 'Out, Out -' Here, it wasn't certain that the boy would die, a doctor had been called, someone was monitoring the pulse:

And then - the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little - less - nothing! - and that ended it.
No more to build on there ...

This is artistically, emotionally, dramatically at a far higher level than Seamus Heaney's plain and bland, not at all searing line 'The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned.'

The line

The space we stood around had been emptied

is worse. The living person wasn't 'the space.' The emptying of death isn't the emptying of something almost a void to begin with, the space, but the emptying of a living person. This is abysmal. The abysmal standard is fully maintained in the final line,

High cries were felled and a pure change happened.

The 'high' is simply to confirm a linkage with high trees, when they are felled, perhaps, and 'a pure change happened' is a reminder that his justified reputation as a maker of vivid, sensuous concrete language is one-sided. In his later work, again and again there are inert abstractions and inert vagueness, as in 'pure change' and 'happened'

These lines by Isaac Rosenberg from 'Dead Man's Dump' on the moment of death are far more powerful, a different order of artistry. Only the first two lines here are directly comparable with the lines from 'Clearances.' The other lines reflect the circumstances, action during the First World War. The third line here is less successful than the others:

None saw their spirits' shadow shake the grass,
Or stood aside for the half-used life to pass
Out of those doomed nostrils or doomed mouth,
When the swift iron burning bee
Draining the wild honey of their youth.

In 'Clearances 7,' the lines before the turn are moving, wonderful. The poem begins

In the last minutes he said more to her
Almost than in all their life together.

The 'Almost' at the beginning of the second line is poignant word-placing. The first 8 lines of the poem are poignant poetry. They remind me of the poems about the life and death of his father by Tony Harrison, an unjustly neglected poet. Yeats's poetry was on a plane far above everyday things such as everyday death - a limitation.

Clearances 8 (The Haw Lantern)

The opening of this poem and the opening of a poem by the German expressionist poet Georg Heym, 'Die Gefangenen I,' 'The Prisoners I,' are revealing in their linkages and contrasts. This is Seamus Heaney:

I thought of walking round and round a space
Utterly empty, utterly a source
Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place
In our front hedge above the wallflowers.

This is Georg Heym, in my translation:

They tramp in circles round the prison yard.
Their look roams to and fro in empty space,
searching for a field, a tree,
and crashes back from walled and empty white.

Like a mill wheel turning,
so turn the black tracks of their steps.
And like a monk's tonsured head,
the centre of the yard is empty, bright.

Sie trampeln um den Hof im engen Kreis.
Ihr Blick schweift hin und her in kahlen Raum.
Er sucht nach einem Feld, nach einem Baum,
Und prallt zurück von kahler Mauern Weiss.

Wie in den Mühlen dreht der Rädergang,
So dreht sich ihrer Schritte schwarze Spur.
Und wie ein Schädel mit der Möchstonsur,
So liegt des Hofes Mitte kahl und blank.

'Clearances 8' follows immediately after the description of the death of his mother in 'Clearances 7.' There was every reason why the poem should be just as stark as Georg Heym's poem or even more stark. 'Clearances 8' is obviously a continuation of the previous poem. What it shows is how starkness, bareness, barrenness, and the desolation of a soul, or mind, are alien to Seamus Heaney - his tame and commonplace vision or lack of vision, in so many poems. Desolation lasts hardly any time at all in his poetry, as here. Almost immediately, we have a reassuring return to the normality of 'our front hedge above the wallflowers.' In the poem - not at all, I'd think, in the experience which gave rise to the poem - the period of darkness, numbness, emptiness is far too short.

Only 'utterly empty' gives any feeling of desolation. 'Utterly a source' adds nothing. It subtracts from 'utterly empty.'

'I thought of walking round and round' is another of his abysmal openings, the half-hearted 'I thought of ...' suggesting something aimless, something which might or might not take place. It's clear enough that it wouldn't take place and didn't take place. Walking round and round would be pointless and eccentric, with none of the compulsion under which Georg Heym's prisoners walked round and round. The fact that the hedge remained after the tree had gone leaves us wondering how much space there would be to walk round anyway.

The nearness of the hedge is in conflict with the bare, geometrical associations of 'space,' in this context. Georg Heym's prisoners were confined in a bare, geometrical space, yearning for the sight of nature but denied it, in poetically successful tension.

It's clear enough that all this amounts to no more than an idea. This is confirmed by almost identical lines in Section III of 'Station Island,' the title poem of the volume 'Station Island.'

I thought of walking round
and round a space utterly empty,
utterly a source, like the idea of sound.

The philosopher David Hume distinguished 'impressions' and 'ideas.' His discussion is relevant to poets and relevant to this passage, even though this is only the starting point for a philosophy of some complexity. From Book I, Part I of 'A Treatise of Human Nature:'

'All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call IMPRESSIONS and IDEAS. The difference betwixt these consists in the degrees of force and liveliness, with which they strike upon the mind, and make their way into our thought or consciousness. Those perceptions, which enter with most force and violence, we may name impressions; and under this name I comprehend all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul. By ideas I mean the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning ..'

I only take from this passage the stress upon the lesser vivacity of ideas. I discuss semantic force in my page, 'The poetry of Seamus Heaney: flawed success.' I'd add these comments to make the discussion relevant to such a phrase as Seamus Heaney's 'the idea of sound' and his chestnut tree.

'Intellectual excitement may give to words, ideas and such entities as equations, real semantic force. The mathematician who devised the concept of the mathematical set wrote that when he thought of the word 'set' he experienced a chasm. The great botanist Linnaeus, who devised the binomial system of nomenclature, very likely used the word 'classification' in the same way.'

I think that 'the idea of sound' and a chestnut tree no longer present in fact but only as an idea, have hardly any poetic vivacity, are poetically ineffective.

Neil Corcoran claims that the chestnut tree 'must owe something of its symbolic associativeness here to Yeats's visionary chestnut tree in 'Among School Children.' ' Symbols often do require some background knowledge to understand them, but not comprehensive knowledge of the work of other poets to animate the symbol. Seamus Heaney may or may not have intended the chestnut tree to be a symbol but the text is more important than the intentions of the author. If the author fully intends an effect then the text should reflect the intention more clearly than here. Yeats's chestnut tree is far, far richer in its presence:

O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

The depiction of a rich presence is needed to give semantic force to the absence, the taking away of the rich presence.

He explains the circumstances in which the tree was cut down in the essay on Patrick Kavanagh in his prose work, 'The Government of the Tongue.' The cutting down of the chestnut tree is described in some of the remaining lines. The use of a tool as small as a 'hatchet' rather than an axe to cut down the tree is very surprising. Its 'differentiated / Accurate cut' is perhaps misjudged, suggesting a scientific accuracy in an action which has none of these qualities but the 'collapse' and 'wreckage of it all' are effective. 'Deep planted' is misleading to anyone who knows anything about planting trees. 'Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere,' is an example of the ineffective linkage of ineffective concrete and ineffective abstract in his work.

The poem ends, referring to the chestnut tree,

Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere,
A soul ramifying and forever
Silent, beyond silence listened for.

Seamus Heaney turned far too quickly from human extinction to the extinction of of the chestnut tree. The equation of the two is false and worrying.

Helen Vendler refers to 'The sensual tactility of 'heft' and 'hush', the irradiating force (after these softnesses) of the vivid vowel in 'bright' ...' but to anyone without the Vendlerian sensitivity to language, 'heft' and 'hush' will seem completely lacking in 'tactility' and the 'vivid vowel' in 'bright' will seem far less significant than the fact that 'bright' has forceful initial and final consonants, which do contrast effectively with the softness of 'heft' and 'hush.' 'Bright nowhere' is an ineffective oxymoron.

She commends the 'infinite participial extension of 'ramifying'' in the last lines of the poem,

A soul ramifying and forever
Silent, beyond silence listened for.

'Ramifying is a wonderful word, I think, but not to be linked with 'soul.' The isolation and nakedness of a human soul without a body, without the ability to act on the world through a body (a Cartesian conception) is what makes it one the most unramifying things that can be imagined. We have no reason to think that the 'soul' of a chestnut tree, the subject of these lines, is any more ramifying than a human soul. As for 'forever / Silent, beyond silence listened for' the chestnut tree was 'forever silent' whilst it was living! It's no more silent now that it's no longer living. But these speculations on the soul of a chestnut tree will seem ridiculous - faintly ridiculous or grossly ridiculous - to everyone but 'tree-huggers,' believers in the wisdom of trees, and commentators who are easily pleased.

There are also commentators like Neil Corcoran who wilfully misread the perfectly clear text, which, to repeat the point, is about the soul of a chestnut tree not a human soul. He thinks that 'forever / Silent, beyond silence listened for' is 'a refusal of any traditional Catholic Christian consolation, where 'forever' would carry the assurance of an eternal afterlife ...'

Wolfe Tone (The Haw Lantern)

A full recognition of this poem's badness needs some background knowledge, of the man Wolfe Tone and of Seamus Heaney's development.

In an early poem, 'The Forge,' the blacksmith 'leather-aproned, hairs in his nose' 'expends himself in shape and music.' This is less vivid than

The unpredictable fantail of sparks
Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.

and less vivid than the description of his father in 'Follower.'

He added before very long some tender and homely portraits, but as it became clearer that he wanted to become a poet of stature, on the international and not just the regional stage, his significant disadvantages became clearer. Was his poetic mind, or poetic technique, adequate in the least for portraying the realities which disfigured the twentieth century? Could Seamus Heaney, as poet, ever have portrayed a Stalin, for instance? It would have required far more than Stalin 'expending' himself as he opposed the Germans at Stalingrad and organized the Ukrainian famine or the terror which killed or ruined the lives of millions more. It would have required far more than a vivid description of Stalin's facial hair.

It's clear from his later work as well as his early work that there are vast areas of human experience which lie far beyond the reach of his poetry. Martin Seymour-Smith comments on Tom Stoppard's play 'Travesties,' 'this farce suddenly collapses when it has to deal with the personality of Lenin - Stoppard cannot deal with such people ...'

This isn't to say that the same vast areas of human experience lie far beyond the reach of his thinking, reflecting, prose writing. Seamus Heaney's 'Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet' is one prose piece among many others which shows the breadth of his thinking, reflecting, prose writing. This particular piece is concerned among other things with Mandelstam and Stalin. Here, it's clear that The Great Terror is within his scope, but not as a poet. In poets who write prose, it would be a mistake to identify the poet and prose writer. There are things the poet can do which the prose writer can't, and vice-versa. The poet and the prose writer are often markedly different people. Sometimes the prose works try to attain some poetic qualities but fail, sometimes they have a different purpose. This is the case with Wordsworth's 'Guide to the Lakes,' which is concerned with the same natural settings as so much of his poetry, but is markedly different - exceptionally sensitive, with aesthetic insights of a high order, but without the poet's insight into the inscape of nature, and practical rather than rapt: 'with a description of the scenery , &c. for the use of tourists and residents.'

The Portuguese poet Pessoa (the 'orthonym') devised three 'heteronyms,' three poets writing contrasting poetry. More often than not, every poet who writes literary prose is an orthonym with at least one heteronym.

Wolfe Tone was no precursor of Stalin or Lenin, but he was a formidable figure, completely committed to establishing an Irish republic by means of armed rebellion. With others, he founded the Society of the United Irishmen, a militant and secret organization. He claimed to have written a proclamation of the Society ordering that Irishmen found to be armed and in the British service should be shot at once. He supported a plan to land French troops in England which would devastate Bristol. To bring about a republican government in an independent Ireland he relied on French military intervention. A French fleet with 14 000 soldiers appeared off the southern coast of Ireland in late 1796 and Wolfe Tone was with them, but adverse weather prevented a landing. In 1798, he took part in a further raid but was captured by the British. He was sentenced to be hanged, but committed suicide by cutting his throat.

W E H Lecky wrote of him, in 'A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century,' Vol. V, 'He rises far above the dreary level of commonplace which Irish conspiracy in general represents.' Although ruthlessness was part of his complex personality, F MacDermot wrote in 'Theobald Wolfe Tone and his Times' that he was 'the most lovable as well as the most talented of Irish nationalists. Richard English, in 'Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland,' described him as 'the most convivial of Irish revolutionary heroes' and 'energetic, dynamic, lively, quick-minded and engaging.' And 'Tone saw himself as a lover of liberty, a committed opponent of tyranny.'

This is an example of Wolfe Tone's forceful style, from his 'Memoirs.' It's described in Seamus Heaney's poem as 'well bred. He wrote that ' it had been his aim 'To subvert the tyranny of our execrable government, to break the connection with England, the never failing source of all our political evils, and to assert the independence of my country - these were my objects. To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissensions, and to substitute the common name of Irishman, in the place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter - these were my means.' (But see my section The rebellion of 1798 in 'The distortions of Irish history, which makes clear the {restriction} on Irish independence and the illusions which underlay the hopes of Wolfe Tone and so many others.)

In 'Wolfe Tone:'

I affected epaulettes and a cockade,
wrote a style well-bred and impervious

to the solidarity I angled for,
and played the ancient Roman with a razor.

To describe the fearless man who cut his own throat when faced with certain execution as 'playing the ancient Roman with a razor' is contemptible. It's surely Seamus Heaney's own style which is 'well bred' in this poem, and impervious to any deeper demands.

This Travesty of a poem ends with an evocation of the storm at sea which prevented a French landing and the landing of Wolfe Tone. The last line is feeble but at least Seamus Heaney puts the poem out of its misery after relatively few lines.

and the big fleet split and Ireland dwindled
as we ran before the gale under bare poles.

Squaring xiii (Seeing Things)

No matter what good lines or part-lines may have gone before, often amounting to a vein or two of precious metal amidst the dross, most of Seamus Heaney's poems end lamely. This isn't one of the exceptions. The last verse-paragraph is instantly forgettable.

What comes before deserves a place only in short-term memory. The unexpected conjunctions and similes are striking only momentarily.

'Hazel stealth' opens the poem. Despite any appearances to the contrary, it's not an intriguing opening. A large number of other conjunctions would have given just as effective, or ineffective, an opening. 'Stealth' is 'the act or characteristic of moving with extreme care and quietness, esp. so as to avoid detection.' (Collins English Dictionary.) As the hazel is incapable of movement, and as the hazel is in sunlight, not in the last able 'to avoid detection,' this conjunction is abortive for more than one reason. This isn't the kind of poem which blurs categories in an interesting way, which makes kinetic things which are immobile. This is Seamus Heaney going through the motions.

In this same opening stanza, we read 'athletic sealight ... on the sea itself.' The 'athletic' recalls the equally crass 'athletic glacier' in 'Waterfall' ('Death of a Naturalist.') A natural, not over-literal question to ask is, 'Why exactly is the light 'athletic?' It's unlikely that Seamus Heaney had in mind the speed of light - so much quicker than any associations of 'athletic' - or any changes in the light. With the 'athletic glacier' to hand as an example of Seamus Heaney's all too common arbitrariness and casualness in his use of words, it seems most likely that he simply liked the sound of 'athletic sealight.' He was oblivious to the ineffectiveness of the conjunction just as he was oblivious to the obviousness of 'sealight' falling on the sea. (Compare the not in the least surprising description of the 'winter-evening' as 'cold' in 'Glanmore Revisited,' '1, 'Scrabble' in this same volume.) The {ordering} of 'on the sea itself,' placed before 'on silent roofs and gables' is surely faulty. 'On the sea' itself involves a great broadening, maximum expansiveness, but 'on silent roofs and gables' involves a jarring contraction. The phrasing isn't at all natural, and it isn't incisively and interestingly unnatural either.

In the second verse paragraph, 'Hedges hot as chimneys' isn't based on observed, natural fact (hedges aren't as hot as chimneys even when there's no fire) and isn't incisively, interestingly unnatural either. This is more botched phrasing. The best phrase in the poem, genuinely striking, is what follows, 'Chairs on all fours' but 'fossil poetry' in the next line is another conjunction which isn't obviously more vivid, profound, interesting or exciting than any of innumerable random conjunctions.

In the third verse-paragraph, 'desire' is 'like a gorged cormorant.' Desire is unsatisfied, hungry, not at all like a 'gorged cormorant,' The qualification 'within its moat' is intended, it seems, to qualify 'desire' so that the simile applies, but the associations of the concrete 'moat' make it very difficult to understand how this is possible.

Squaring xxiv (Seeing Things)

This, in 'Seeing Things,' is like one of those amateur paintings of coast and harbour scenes - significantly, almost always depictions of reassuring calm and stability, technically unadventurous, confining themselves to routine realism or impressionism, with no trace of individual vision.

Deserted harbour stillness. Every stone
Clarified and dormant under water,
The harbour wall a masonry of silence.

Word-painting of considerable skill, certainly, but a little thought demonstrates that despite the skill, this is piling words on words. 'Deserted harbour stillness' is nothing much. A computer program, a Poetic Phrase Generator, could easily produce it. Of the stones making up the harbour, some will be below water, some above - not 'every stone ... under water.' 'Clarified' and 'dormant' may impress, but water reduces light intensity compared to air, particularly when the water is as murky as it is around the British Isles, and the stones can't be 'clarified.' They will always be less clear in water than in air. 'Masonry of silence' is redundant. It follows from 'deserted harbour stillness.'

The next two stanzas are better, in part, the high point before the relapse into abstraction, and a poetic standard which is abysmal:

Air and ocean known as antecedents
Of each other. In apposition with
Omnipresence, equilibrium, brim.

Squaring xxxvi (Seeing Things)

Recycling Dante had a disastrous effect on the fragmentary achievement of The Strand at Lough Beg, increasing the proportion of dross to wonderful poetry. Recycled Dante is the basis of this poem, a far less wonderful and far more forgettable one. Seamus Heaney was under the illusion that what was created centuries ago could retain its power and could form the basis of a contemporary poem with something of the same power. He was mistaken.

The introductory verse-paragraph is all his own work, though. There's the mention of 'danger.' What kind of danger? The only clue given is 'the march dispersed.' Was this a march of the Protestant Orange Order? Not 'in darkness,' surely. Even readers very well informed about Northern Ireland will be left puzzled, as well as indifferent, probably. The very short sentences in this stanza are straining for significance and don't intensify the feeling of danger in the least:

Once. In darkness. With all the streetlamps off.

Why were the streetlamps off? Probably as a result of a simple electrical fault.

As in the case of The Toome Road and From the Frontier of Writing, which are about the routine experience of being stopped by soldiers (routine in the conditions of Northern Ireland during the Troubles), there's no reason for supposing that the experience in this poem was anything but routine. Craig Raine criticized Don Paterson (in Areté Issue 22): 'a grandiose pretence, a self-aggrandising weakness for talking things up. In a word, exaggeration, a kind of immodesty that relies on no one calling your bluff.' Similimente, as Dante would have written, 'in the same way,' Seamus Heaney very often does much the same.

There follows some half-hearted comparison of policemen's torches to 'fireflies, say ...' in Dante.' This march, whatever form it took, was obviously policed, like most marches in Northern Ireland. Even if the police were seen as sectarian, any march with police present was likely to be far less dangerous to onlookers than any march without police present. Onlookers could generally ensure that they were in even less danger by simply keeping their distance. But a simple comparison with genuinely dangerous experience, such as the experience of correspondents in Iraq and Afghanistan, shows the ridiculous weakness of making so much of the 'danger' here.

In this, from Hölderlin's 'Patmos'

Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch

But where danger is, rescue grows too

danger is given no concrete illustration. Seamus Heaney's poem supplies some concrete illustration, even if inadequately. Why is the danger, then, so much more poetically effective in 'Patmos,' so much more highly charged - at least in the original? The line from Patmos belongs to a dynamic force-field.

As an analogy, a rock resting on the ground belongs to a physical force-field, the downward weight of the rock opposed by an equal and opposite force, a static equilibrium with dynamic implications. A rock which is hurled is acted on by opposing but not equal forces, the force propelling it much stronger than the force opposing it. A rock which is slowly moved by the force of water in a river is part of a force-field too, acted on by dynamic, opposing, unequal forces.

Seamus Heaney's poetry hardly ever seems part of a dynamic force-field, which is part of the reason why so often it seems so flat. I'm not referring here, of course, to the wonderful lines but the force of these too is non-dynamic. Opposition and contrast are central to the creation of a poetic force-field, such as the opposition or contrast of ambiguity, ambivalence and paradox, almost entirely absent from his poetry.

Using 'safety' now rather than 'rescue,' danger is intensified by or brought into sharp contrast with safety. A climber in desperate danger sees a tiny handhold almost within reach, which would give the relief of safety. An explorer lost in a hostile environment is conscious of safety, but safety at great {distance}.

In this poem, it isn't safety which seems at great {distance} from danger but danger which seems at great {distance} from safety. As almost always in his poetry, the reassuring is much more prominent than the disturbing, the unreassuring.

The poet and his companion are then described as 'herded shades' who went to their car, now compared with Charon's boat. For readers not too familiar with Dante, his translation of some lines from The Inferno in this same volume is helpful (I discuss his translation at length), helpful in showing that none of the details in this episode in Dante's Inferno have a linkage with this obscure episode in Northern Ireland, in making clear how contrived the whole poem is.

In Dante's 'Inferno,' it's the damned who are herded into Charon's boat. In this Squarings poem, for Seamus Heaney to describe himself and his companion as the damned should give rise to healthy ridicule, not to solemn admiration. There's no Charon the boatman. Either Seamus Heaney or his companion will turn the key in the ignition, engage first gear, release the handbrake and move away. Whereas Charon's boat crosses the Styx, the poet and his companion cross something more mundane, perhaps a car park, before getting into the car.

Cars are generally resistant to being linked with anything that isn't mundane, useful, flashy, superficial. In general, cars are resistant to being given a metaphorical function. This attempt to give resonance and transcendental significance to driving a car, from Chapter 23, 'Excurse,' of D H Lawrence's 'Women in Love,' seems obviously a failure: ' ... with a sort of second consciousness he steered the car towards a destination. For he had the free intelligence to direct his own ends. His arms and his breast and his head were rounded and living like those of the Greek, he had not the unawakened straight arms of the Egyptian, nor the sealed, slumbering head. A lambent intelligence played secondarily above his pure Egyptian concentration in darkness ... The car crept slowly along, until he saw the post office.' And perhaps Seamus Heaney's car, after standing in for Charon's boat in the Inferno - not Dantesque but fake-Dante - came to some ordinary road-works.

'Scene from Dante,' Seamus Heaney claims: a claim for the prestige of Dante. All it amounts to is a 'scene from Seamus Heaney,' in his role as the derivative recycler.

St Kevin and the Blackbird
(The Spirit Level)

Seamus Heaney chose to read this poem at the offices of Faber, his publisher, on the occasion of his 70th birthday: incomprehensible.

In Ulsterectomy, Andrew Waterman compared the literary culture of Northern Ireland and England: 'England sustains a literary culture that, with all its faults, is vastly more serious, diversified, intelligent, and capable of relating its achievement to serious standards.' I think this was, and is, too harsh. in its poetic achievement - in relation to the size of its population, then Northern Ireland has achieved a very great deal, even without considerations of size of population.

I think that Andrew Waterman's words can be reinterpreted and heavily modified. Contemporary writers of prose fiction and contemporary critics of prose fiction - and contemporary historians - have cultures that, despite any faults, are vastly more serious, diversified, intelligent, and capable of relating achievement to serious standards than some prominent poetry and poetry criticism.

I think that 'St Kevin and the Blackbird' and Helen Vendler's commentary on the poem can't be related to serious standards.

Some remarks before I discuss the poem and Helen Vendler's commentary. My estimate of Seamus Heaney's poetry owes nothing, I think, to what Helen Vendler calls 'thematic' considerations. It owes nothing to the fact that I'm an atheist and Seamus Heaney, although not a practising Catholic any longer, has respect for Catholicism, and that Catholicism is a strong influence in many places, including 'St Kevin and the Blackbird.' I place him above Shelley, who was an atheist and wrote on the necessity for atheism. I place poets with a strong Christian faith such as John Donne, George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins much further above Shelley. The poetry of the atheist Shelley shrinks into relative insignificance compared with the poetry of the Catholic Dante.

The first part of 'St Kevin and the Blackbird.' ('The Spirit Level.') is very charming, very attractive, and very slight. Seamus Heaney demonstrates, if only in a very small portion of the poem, his strength in concrete language - 'the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked neat head and claws.'

The second part is far less accomplished, more evidence that Seamus Heaney has only the most limited abilities in revision. Any poet with any critical abilities would have eliminated the second part and published only the first, even though the first part too is weak, despite appearances. The inability to go beyond appearances explains very many critical blunders, including very many in Helen Vendler's book. Anyone who judged people just by appearances would very likely be in deep trouble. The second part begins with some poetic rubbish, which Helen Vendler is obviously on too high a plane to notice. In fact she applies the same processes of 'analysis' as for the first part.

And since the whole thing's imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?

Helen Vendler devotes very nearly four pages to an analysis of the two parts of this poem. The most grotesque part of the analysis, and shockingly condescending, is a set of questions and answers which recalls elementary, unimaginative instruction in the humanities, or an earnest bureaucrat standing by a computer in a darkened hall before a captive audience, projecting on a screen inane questions: 'Change. Which departments will manage change? Which key personnel will manage change? What resources are needed to manage change? What is the time scale for change?'

This is from the first part (Line Removal would show more clearly than the original lineal form just how prosaic it is), followed by some of Helen Vendler's questions and answers. The answers make it clear, for example, to anyone unsure of the facts, that rather than standing, sitting, lying down, lounging around, eating or drinking St Kevin was kneeling.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked

Into the network of eternal life,
Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

Helen Vendler does turn to more technical matters, as if realizing that her readership isn't predominantly made up of young secondary school pupils or people on a training day. She points out 'the maintenance throughout of the present indicative until the 'must hold' of modal obligation (line 10) replaces it.' 'Modal obligation' sounds very impressive, but before prostrating ourselves before it, we ought to consider.

'Must' requires {resolution}. One very important use is the spurious 'must' or arguable 'must,' the 'must' which needs healthy critical scrutiny, not the 'must' to be acted on automatically. As in the 'justification' for the death penalty, 'whoever sheds a man's or woman's blood must die.' Seamus Heaney's must is spurious. It isn't being over-literal to say that St Kevin had alternatives to the ridiculous notion of holding out his arm for weeks. The whole notion of someone confining himself to a narrow cell for the sake of holiness, of becoming a hermit, demands scrutiny. (St Kevin became a hermit after his ordination.)

Richard Dawkins and many others have put objections to Christian belief and practice which are very substantial but which have a long history. No matter what was possible for Dante, George Herbert, John Donne and, late in the day, Gerard Manley Hopkins, any poetry which completely ignores these objections is frivolous. In the nineteenth century, Matthew Arnold, in 'Dover Beach' recognized the force of objections to Christian belief.

But the objections to St Kevin and similar saints go well beyond objections to Christianity as a whole. Discounting a recalcitrant fringe, Contemporary Christianity has discarded most of its most ridiculous and most objectionable features, such as the notion in the dark ages and the middle ages that someone can seek holiness by becoming a hermit, by having nothing to do with the opposite sex, by hardly ever speaking - whilst ignoring active persecution of unbelievers, the killing of fellow Christians with a different understanding of theology, believing in the eternal damnation of unbelievers, believing that medical advances and common cleanliness are completely unimportant, believing that monks and nuns and seekers after holiness to the exclusion of all else are the most important of all people, whilst active reformers and relievers of suffering are unimportant.

The claim in the poem that the saint finds himself, like the blackbird, 'linked into the eternal network of life' is wide of the mark. This was an age which denied that animals have immortal souls. Any consideration for animals was to do with spiritual benefits to the person, as St Thomas Aquinas made clear. The saint who refused to kill the lice who infested his body, because he was better off than the lice - he had an immortal soul and the lice did not - belonged to the same world as St Kevin.

A contemporary writer of a minor poem about the saint need pay no attention to such considerations of these. A contemporary writer of a major poem about the saint should attend to them, but without any guarantee, of course of artistic success. Richard Dawkins, so far as I know, has never written poetry. We can be grateful.

Lightness, charm, lack of strenuousness, like bluntness and coarseness, make a writer's work more varied. A writer who can include them is giving a wider survey of life. Basil Lam, in 'Beethoven String Quartets,' in connection with the last movement of Beethoven's last quartet, Opus 135, wrote of 'the true Mozartean tradition by which the most serious things could, after all, be said without solemnity or portentousness.' Seamus Heaney's poetry is more often heavy and portentous, turgid even, than light or fleeting. He has far too little talent for poetic rhythm to propel his verse nimbly and gracefully, with exceptions. This is one of the exceptions, and a delight, section VI of 'Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces' ('North'):

'Did you ever hear tell,'
said Jimmy Farrell,
'of the skulls they have
in the city of Dublin?

White skulls and black skulls
and yellow skulls, and some
with full teeth, and some
haven't only but one,'

Mycenae Lookout (The Spirit Level)

This is a poem which has great impact. Here, Seamus Heaney was obviously fully engaged. In a great deal of his later poetry, he hasn't been fully engaged. (A distant but useful standard of comparison: the intensity and concentration of sporting achievement at a high level, such as a downhill skier hurtling down a mountain. By this very high standard, too much of his later poetry is half-hearted.) His commitment here gave a poem which, for once, has greater urgency of rhythm in some places, or the illusion of an urgent rhythm.

The overall impact of the poem amounts to an illusion, not the necessary theatrical illusion of a compelling theatre production but the dramatically effective illusion of a production which works despite a script with many flaws. This is a 'poem-script' which despite appearances contains only a small number of strong lines and a very large number of his recurrent faults, such as carelessness in the use of language. The different moods, tones and registers - this is a poem with great variety - are successfully conveyed by very imperfect means.

'Before 'The Watchman's War,' there's a short quotation, presumably from Aeschylus' 'Agamemnon,' the source which lies behind 'Mycenae Lookout.' He translates it as 'The ox is on my tongue.' If so, 'is' is a weak and colourless translation of in, 'a great ox stands on my tongue.' He has omitted 'great.' This is a proverbial expression, and he may for some reason have translated the expression in the form , although it doesn't appear in 'Agamemnon,' which means 'an ox has trodden on my tongue.' He's not offering a translation or even a 'version' of Aeschylus in the rest of 'Mycenae Lookout' and he could have made far more of this ox: instead of the inert, static weight of the animal in Seamus Heaney's translation, the weight of the animal in motion, clumsy, blundering, or unable to avoid stepping on the tongue or treading on the tongue, far more vivid.

I'm using 'translates' and 'translation' here very loosely. The fact is that Seamus Heaney doesn't have a knowledge of Greek, any more than Romanian ('The First Words,' the poem after 'Mycenae Lookout,' is described as 'from the Romanian of Martin Sorescu.') It was unwise of him to give a translation, or a 'version' or a paraphrase of the proverbial expression of the ox and the tongue, let alone a version or paraphrase of Sophocles' 'Philoctetes' in 'The Cure at Troy.' (This is Seamus Heaney as dilettante.) He hasn't transformed by his own unique poetic gifts the translations produced by drudges who have a knowledge of classical Greek but lack his own gift for poetry. The translations of the phrase available to him are in general much better than his own.

Seamus Heaney has over-extended himself in the use he makes of texts in foreign languages other than Irish or Latin, as translator, writer of 'versions' and even as critic. (He has a knowledge of Irish but not an extensive knowledge.) Justin Quinn writes in 'Heaney and Eastern Europe' ('The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney) that ' ... his engagement with Slavic poets was superficial because Heaney has neither reading nor speaking proficiency in any Slavic language, and this fact should not be passed over too quickly.'

1. The Watchman's War

In the twenty-two lines of the first verse paragraph, there are only three and a half lines which are good:

I'd dream of blood in bright webs in a ford,
Of bodies raining down like tattered meat

and

... on that line
Where the blaze would leap the hills when Troy had fallen.

The lines

... and me the lookout
The queen's command had posted and forgotten,

aren't poor. All the other lines are poor, but they still have impact. Like planes which can sustain catastrophic damage but still fly, the poem flies, against all the odds. It will fly in the first reading and perhaps in a few more readings, but sooner or later, the poem's essential poorness tells against it, decisively. Then, it's obvious that it's stricken after all, rather than strong.

Any expectations of Aeschylean weight and grandeur are disappointed by the flat and ordinary opening line,

Some people wept, and not for sorrow - joy

and in the second line, 'the king had ... upped' confirms the impression that this isn't going to be in the least a 'neo-Aeschylean' poem. We can be relieved that it isn't. 'Neo- ' generally amounts to 'inferior to.' No neo-Gothic building has the rightness of the best Gothic building and no neo-classic building has the perfection of the Parthenon.

From faults in tone to more clear-cut faults in accuracy of language:

But inside me like struck sound in a gong.

He's referring to the memory of killing remaining in his memory, 'That killing-fest ... still ... endured.' Most instruments can sustain a sound, but not percussion instruments such as a gong. Once the gong has been struck, the sound begins to die away and very quickly has gone. He could hardly have chosen a worse linkage. The image of an ox somehow blundering against a gong - possible but very improbable - compounds the blunder: 'And then the ox would lurch against the gong / And deaden it ...'

These lines are ridiculous:

... I would feel my tongue
Like the dropped gangplank of a cattle truck,
Trampled and rattled, running piss and muck,

Whereas 'the ox is on my tongue' is much too plain, these lines aren't plain enough. They're vivid but pathologically vivid. They sustain the illusion of the illusion (compare Plato's 'imitation of an imitation') that significant events are taking place, unlike 'swimmy-trembly,' which would be fatal to the illusion except that it's followed immediately by something more effective, 'the lick of fire.'

A victory beacon in an abattoir ...

illustrates very clearly the gulf between sound and sense in this poem. The sound is very good, but victory beacons are always constructed in places where they can be easily seen, in places where they can have an impact. They are never hidden away indoors, as in an abattoir.

The lines

Exposed to what I knew, still honour-bound
To concentrate attention out beyond
The city and the border ...

are routine ('Parnassian.')

In the second verse-paragraph of twenty-three lines there are five good lines (including a half-line):

... clouds bloodshot with the red
Of victory fires, the raw wound of that dawn

and

The agony of Clytemnestra's love-shout
That rose through the palace like the yell of troops
Hurled by King Agamemnon from the ships.

But the stanza has such momentum that the flaws seem less serious.The stanza seems - is - quite powerful in its impact. The first stanza's lack of momentum now seems less flawed. It's essential preparation for this stanza. This first section, The Watchman's War, begins to seem like a poetic success, of a kind, even after sceptical examination of the details: a very unlikely success, an undeserved success, but definitely not a failure.

It may help that not many of the lines are dire. This line is pretentious as well as dire:

Flawed the black mirror of my frozen stare

If 'black mirror' was intended to be an effective oxymoron, the intention wasn't enough. Like 'black glacier' in 'Funeral Rites' (North) it's an unsubtle contrast. Given Seamus Heaney's blunders when a concept in Physics is introduced, I don't think for one moment that he had in mind the physical fact that a mirror reflects the incident radiation, black absorbs all the incident radiation.

As for 'the god of justice' hanging his 'scale-pans' on the Watchman, because he was 'tensed,' this might have been plausible if the Watchman had tetanus, in which the body is exceptionally rigid, the muscles in a state of extreme contraction - but here, the claim is ridiculous. This fails the 'literalness test,' simply imagining the image being actually enacted, a test which isn't usually appropriate but surely is here.

The 'raw wound of that dawn / Igniting and erupting, bearing down / Like lava on a fleeing population' again fails the literalness test. What has happened is that an image, the raw wound of the dawn, which I think is excellent in itself, has become far more than an image. It has taken on an independent life of its own, it has become literally intended. So, the wound is free to ignite, to erupt like a volcano, and, most ridiculously, the wound can even pursue a fleeing population. Even if a dawn has dramatic impact, a dawn which bears down 'like lava' is excessive, exaggerated. This goes well beyond poetic licence.

2. Cassandra

'No such thing / as innocent / bystanding' has the disadvantage of being obviously false, like the later lines 'No such thing / as innocent.' When poetic licence actively falsifies, then it's better to do without the poetic licence.

'Her soiled vest' is a recycling of 'soiled.' The word appeared in much earlier poems, 'Summer' (North), has '... flourished / The stained cape of his heart as history charged.' 'Punishment' (North), has 'her blindfold a soiled bandage.' By now, the word was less vivid, on the way to becoming a Heaneyan cliché word.

The relative urgency of the very short lines doesn't conceal the familiar faults, such as ineffective abstraction, as with 'trueness' in 'People / could feel // a missed / trueness ... ' On the other hand, the momentum does conceal some of the faultiness of 'the gene-hammer ... of the roused god.' It requires some protracted examination of the phrase and some ingenuity to give a convincing meaning to this phrase. But a critical opinion can be given of 'gene-hammer' as soon as it's heard or read: a contrived and ineffective conjunction of microscoptic-macroscopic.

Against all the odds, this section does succeed. The very coarse and direct lines are effective. There are effective throwaway lines such as '.... 'A wipe / of the sponge, / that's it' but this completely original: a clear reference to lines 1328 - 1329 of Aschylus' 'Agamemnon:'

... If misfortune strikes,
the stroke of a wet sponge destroys the drawing.

3. His Dawn Vision

This section provides an effective contrast with the previous section in tone and length of line, but now that the lines are no longer fluid and fast-moving, the faults are more apparent. This section is predominantly tedious.

Our war stalled in the pre-articulate

is ineffective abstraction again, and my whole being / rained down on myself is ineffective reflexivity.

'I felt the beating of the huge time-wound / We lived inside' recalls 'the raw wound of that dawn / Igniting and erupting, bearing down / Like lava on a fleeing population' ' but now the wound is seemingly linked with a heart ('the beating of the huge time-wound), very unsuccessfully.

But the last three lines are very effective, the effective concrete:

Small crowds of people watching as a man
Jumped a fresh earth-wall and another ran
Amorously, it seemed, to strike him down.

4. The Nights

This is very good. Later, it becomes fluid, shifting, uneasy, obscurely vivid, beginning to abandon meaning, very successfully, an effective contrast with the explicitness of the first verse-paragraph of this section. The main flaw is that a rhythm hardly exists.

The loft-floor where the gods
and goddesses took lovers
and made out endlessly
successfully, those thuds
and moans through the cloud cover
were wholly on his shoulders.

And,

High and low in those days
hit their stride together.
When the captains in the horse
felt Helen's hand caress
its wooden boards and belly
they nearly rode each other.
But in the end Troy's mothers
bore their brunt in alley,
bloodied cot and bed.
The war put all men mad,
horned, horsed or roof-posted,
the boasting and the bested.

The last verse paragraph of this section is more ordinary. It ends,

I moved beyond bad faith:
for his bullion bars, his bonus
was a rope-net and a blood bath.
And the peace had come upon us.

As for 'rope-net,' entanglement, the preliminary to murder in this case, only has resonance in the most limited way. 'Blood bath' is far better, with the ambiguity of literal or metaphorical meaning.

5. His Reverie of Water

At Troy, at Athens, what I most clearly
see and nearly smell
is the fresh water.

This is a lacklustre beginning. Although the human sense of smell is so weak compared to that of many animals, it can give powerful sensations. The complete absence of a sensation can be powerful in itself, but the 'nearly' is middling and weak. This is quantification weakness and 'most clearly' is quantification weakness too. We are left unsure about the watchman's visual field, what else he was looking at, whether he did see the fresh water most clearly. This isn't an interesting indeterminacy and we're left with niggling doubts, avoidable doubts. There are many other adjectives which would have been better than 'fresh.' Fresh water is the complement to salt water, a distracting association and not the intended association here.

There are very poor lines lines such as '... until the hero comes / surging in incomprehensibly' and not only because of the awkwardness of sound 'in / incomprehensibly. There's some unintended transfer of meaning so that 'surging in incomprehensibly' seems to apply to the line itself, the line itself seeming incomprehensible. There's the awkwardness of meaning of 'the treadmill of assault / turned waterwheel,' where those carrying out the assault have to be imagined as suddenly part of a a waterwheel. The treadmill has taken on an independent life of its own and its sudden turning into a waterwheel is awkward. Again, this fails the literalness test.

The well in this section would have been more impressive if Seamus Heaney hadn't given such a superlative and evocative expression of experience in a much earlier poem, 'Personal Helicon,' which concerns very different wells. As it is, it suffers very badly in the comparison.

The lines which end the poem,

in the bountiful round mouths of iron pumps
and gushing taps.

are good, but good in isolation. They don't belong to this poem. Although this section is to do with water and wells, the lines belong to the world of 'Sunlight,' the first poem of 'Mossbawn,' and 'the helmeted pump in the yard' of the Northern Irish farm, not this world, in which water wasn't obtained by using iron pumps.

District and Circle (District and Circle)

To get one thing out of the way first, before I involve myself in this fascinating poem-world as a whole and try to account for its discordant impressions: the poet's reaching out for the 'stubby black roof-wort. ' This shows that Seamus Heaney can be just as careless in creating neologisms as in using established language. Bernard O' Donoghue, the editor of 'The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney,' is very good at noticing things not in the least obvious, particularly in his areas of expertise, such as the 'Eclogues' or 'Bucolics' of Virgil, but poor at noticing the obvious. In his 'Introduction' he writes of 'the powerful physical evocation of the 'roof wort' - a neologism that could not apply to anything else, except perhaps the 'old kale stalk' in 'The Harrow-Pin' in the same book.

It's likely, I think, that Seamus Heaney and Bernard O' Donoghue were only familiar with 'liverwort,' the plant. Reaching out for the 'stubby black roof-wort' is reaching out for something that does resemble the plant, to an extent. But consulting the entry for 'wort' in an English dictionary would have shown that the neologism was misguided, ridiculous.

The word 'wort' has a hallowed and important use in the traditional brewing skills of Ireland and other countries as well as Britain, an important use in high-technology brewing too. The bars of Ireland and the pubs of Britain depend upon wort. Brewing has a rich repertoire of terms, which should appeal very much to Seamus Heaney, such as grist, mashing, fly-mashing, mash tun, underletting, underback, sparging, spendsafe, trub, and carragheen (Irish moss), but 'wort' is one of the most important. Malting converts barley to malt. Wort is the liquid which is extracted from the malt in the mash tun. The pitching of yeast into the wort begins the process of turning wort into the alcoholic drink. Later, there may be gyle-worting. Irish stouts were traditionally gyle-worted.

Reaching for the 'stubby black roof-wort' has, then, associations of the poet immediately showered with liquid from the brewery. How 'roof wort' could ever apply to the old kale stalk,' given that kale, which is related to cabbage, grows in the ground, not upside down from roofs, and 'wort' has these brewing associations is a mystery.

But this miscalculation is obviously only a moment in the poem. As for the poem-world of 'District and Circle, ' I think the choice of the London underground as the subject for a poem was unusual, unexpected, offering so many new opportunities. This is a long way from rural County Derry and marks a notable increase in his range.

The way in which this underground world is reached is described in the lines

Posted, eyes front, along the dreamy ramparts
Of escalators ascending and descending
To a monotonous slight rocking in the works,
We were moved along, upstanding.

This is a characteristic mixture of strength and weakness. A kind of rigid attentiveness is expressed in both 'posted' and 'eyes front' but 'eyes front' is inferior by far. The 'dreamy' of 'the dreamy ramparts / Of escalators' is poor, since escalators are hard, metallic, but so too is 'ramparts,' since the word refers to the embankments of a fort. Although 'a monotonous slight rocking in the works' is beyond praise, the line that follows, 'We were moved along, upstanding' is hopeless. It adds nothing.

'The white tiles gleamed' is simple and effective. As for 'In passages that flowed / With draughts from cooler tunnels' I remember, from having used the underground in London for years, but a long time ago, that adjoining tunnels brought in warmer air. But I don't insist on this point.

'I missed the light / Of all-overing' contains another of Seamus Heaney's neologisms, 'all-overing,' not a worthwhile addition to English in general or this poem in particular.

The line

Parks at lunchtime where the sunners lay

could have been an abrupt and very effective transition from the underground to life above ground, although not in the same artistic category as Wilfred Owen's abrupt transition from cold to warmth in 'Exposure: '

We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare, snow-dazed,
Deep into grassier ditches. So we drowse, sun-dozed,

But the transition in 'District and Circle' is mishandled and almost immediately there's banality: ' ... the sunners lay / On body-heated mown grass regardless,' in which it's obvious enough that the grass, like most grass in these urban settings, will have been mown and the heating effect of somebody lying on the grass isn't worth mentioning. The banality isn't relieved in the slightest by the next line, with its attempt to introduce weighty significance with one word, 'resurrection,' quickly followed by completely inept phrasing,

A resurrection scene minutes before
The resurrection, habitués
Of their garden of delights, of staggered summer.

Rhythmically, too, this is useless.

The first line of the next verse paragraph is

Another level down, the platform thronged.

Even though all that's happened is that we've been taken back to the world below ground after this unsuccessful excursion to the world above ground, our interest is immediately restored. For many readers, 'another level down' will bring to mind the circles of Dante's Inferno. This could well mark the beginning of something exciting, a contemporary Inferno.

In the next line but one, there's mention of 'a crowd.' This echoes T S Eliot's line in The Waste Land,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.

- which echoes Dante's lines in Canto 3 of 'The Inferno,' 'so numerous a host of people ran, / I had not thought death had unmade so many.' (Translated by Anthony Esolen.)

But in this poem, the effect is confused, without impact:

A crowd half straggle-ravelled and half strung
Like a human chain, the pushy newcomers
Jostling and purling underneath the vault,
On their marks to be first through the doors,
Street-loud, then succumbing to herd-quiet ...

There are many things wrong with these lines. These are some of them: yet another neologism which adds nothing to the resources of English in 'straggle-ravelled,' the allusion to starting an athletics race in 'On their marks,' banal and too distant from this situation to add anything, an ineffective conjunction in 'street-loud,' too obviously imitating 'street-wise.'

The remaining lines of this verse paragraph are worse, completely forgettable. 'whelm' is a neologism to the extent that here it's used as a noun, whereas the established (but archaic) meaning is as a verb, 'to engulf with water.' Here, it's fairly effective in isolation but in its context completely 'underwhelming:'

Then caught up in the now-or-never whelm
Of one and all the full length of the train.

The poet gets on to the train, stepping 'on to the carriage metal.' As carriages in the underground are made mainly of metal, this isn't a point worth mentioning. Then he reaches out for the 'stubby black roof-wort,' which I've discussed already. 'stubby,' though, is exact and effective.

More poor lines follow, although 'Spot-rooted, buoyed, aloof,' is an exception. 'Spot-rooted' is an interesting and concise alternative to 'rooted to the spot,' I think, and 'aloof' captures very well the appearance of people travelling on the underground to other passengers, equally aloof.

The remaining lines of the verse paragraph don't repay discussion or even a bare mention.

The final verse paragraph has vivid fragments, not lighting up the dross but in contrast with the dross. The closing words, 'Flicker-lit,' referring probably to electrical discharges, is very distant from the 'twilit water' of 'A New Song' and the girl from Derrygarve (although 'Flicker-lit,' given a line of its own, is isolated, unlike 'twilit,' and amounts to an after-thought. 'Flicker-lit' is too good to be wasted in this way.) There's also 'galleried earth,' a very effective conjunction of underground passage and the dramatic / theatrical, and 'treble / Of iron on iron,' which would have been far more effective without 'one-off' before 'treble:' 'one-off treble / Of iron on iron.' 'One-off' belongs to the everyday world above ground. There are miscalculations to go with these successes, such as the line 'My lofted arm a-swivel like a flail,' in which 'flail' has associations which are much too vigorous, of thrashing around.

The first section, which describes the busker, forms a kind of Prologue. It's at a low level of accomplishment. The linkage between the busker and Charon, confirmed by the giving of a coin to the busker (a coin was given to Charon in the underworld) is trite and formulaic. The fact that the busker has 'two eyes' and not another number ('his two eyes eyeing me') wasn't worth mentioning. The only good line is 'As the music larked and capered ...' which is Elizabethan in its high spirits. It brings to mind the close of Act I, Scene III of 'Twelfth Night,'

Sir Toby ... Let me see thee caper! Ha! Higher! Ha, ha! Excellent!

Bernard O' Donoghue's comment in the Introduction to 'The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney' that 'The poem invites comparison with Rilke's 'Orpheus' in the way that worldly experience translates without strain into the transcendental, 'transported / Through galleried earth with them, the only relict / Of all that I belonged to' is fatuous. For a discussion of Rilke and the transcendental, amongst other matters, see my page Rilke and Kafka.

Wordsworth's Skates (District and Circle)

The partial return to what Seamus Heaney does best after volumes of largely perfunctory poetry in 'District and Circle' is well illustrated by this poem. It's outstanding in its achievement in semantic force in some places.

Words with particular semantic force are underlined here.

But the reel of them on frozen Windermere ... And left it scored.

This is obviously an allusion to the thrilling lines which describe skating in 'The Prelude' (lines 452-457, 1805 version), although Wordsworth was skating on Esthwaite Water, near to Hawkshead, where he went to school, not on Windermere. I discuss these lines, in connection with sectional analysis, on the page concerned with linkages between poetry and music.

reel is very good but not as wonderful as scored, I think. Skating has physicality but often it seems nearly effortless. The ecstatic long glides are more to the fore than the necessary effort in skating, but ice is hard. By describing the lines as 'scored,' Seamus Heaney shows us unforgettably the crystalline hardness of ice. The scored lines are a 'trace' of the ecstatic action, just as the 'one track / Of sparkling light' is a trace of Wordsworth rowing on Ullswater in another 'spot of time' in 'The Prelude.' (lines 357 - 400, 1805 version.)

The intervening line, though, is Parnassian: 'earth' is in ineffective contrast. A factor in an image, such as size, may be excluded or denied by the poet, who may make it clear that another factor, such as colour, is what counts in a simile - but the associations of the excluded factor may be impossible to overlook. Here, the skater is escaping 'the clutch of earth' to speed along the ice, but the associations of earth remain, leaving the line earth-bound in part. There's an awkward transition from 'flashed' to 'clutch of earth' as if the skater were suddenly slowed or brought to a halt by earth on the ice, before speed and smoothness are abruptly restored with 'curve' and 'scored.' The meaning is clear, but images aren't fully under control.

The same problem is apparent in the preceding lines

Not the bootless runners lying toppled
in dust in a display case,
Their bindings perished.

This is outstanding in its semantic force. The image is a memorable one - so memorable that the 'not' is incapable of cancelling it. It remains in the mind, despite the negation, so that there's an abrupt and awkward transition to the last three lines, 'But the reel of them on frozen Windermere ...' in which the skates in their state of deterioration do after all carry the skater on the frozen lake.

The placing of the lines concerned with the skates in the display case reinforces this effect. Their {prior-ordering} in the poem allows the forming of a strong image and the image has inertia, which has a linkage here with inertia in physics: the image tends to continue, despite being negated. In a poem with strong images or language with strong semantic force, these tend to have a dominating effect. This is what I call perturbation. (In Physics, 'perturbation' is a secondary influence which brings about {modification} of simple behaviour. For example, the trajectories of comets are perturbed when they pass close to massive bodies, such as the planets of our solar system. In poetic perturbation, things which are more massive, substantial, vivid tend to have a modifying effect.) In my page metre I discuss metrical inertia and metrical perturbation.

I refer to non-cancellation, non-cancellation of negation, and although the effect is unintended here and has to be counted as a flaw, non-cancellation can be intended and can contribute to the layering of a poem, which can increase its richness and resonance. This is {diversification} of non-cancellation.

Craig Raine, a very acute and perceptive commentator - very perceptive because of his strengths in analysis, amongst other strengths - discusses a famous line, the closing line of Philip Larkin's 'An Arundel Tomb,' which, using my terms, can be interpreted in terms of 'cancellation of part cancellation' and perturbation. (Craig Raine refers to 'cancelling' below but I arrived at the term independently.) The discussion is in 'Counter-Intuitive Larkin,' in Issue Twenty-three of the Arts journal 'Areté.' This is the last verse-paragraph of 'An Arundel Tomb):

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

Martin Amis quoted the moving last line in a fine piece on the victims of one of the planes of 9/11. Philip Larkin intended to cancel it, in part, by 'Our almost-instinct almost true' but the line, the feeling, is too strong to be cancelled. Craig Raine on these lines (a reading of the whole poem is needed to follow all of this):

'Andrew Motion's biography tells us that Larkin wrote on the end of the manuscript draft: 'Love isn't stronger than death just because statues hold hands for 600 years.' Larkin is consciously refuting The Song of Solomon 8.6: 'for love is strong as death.' And logically that - 'Love isn't stronger than death' - is the enforced conclusion of the poem. 'Time has transfigured them into / Untruth.' There is, apparently, no way around this. It fills the doorway like a bouncer saying 'I'm afraid not, sir. If I could just stop you there, sir.' It is reinforced by another denial: the earl and countess didn't mean it. I take it this isn't a reference to the Victorian repairs, but the primacy of the sculptor's role. 'The stone fidelity / They hardly meant ...' Thereafter, though, the qualifications are themselves qualified. Prove is a very strong verb and almost cancels the almost in 'Our almost-instinct almost true'. It again becomes a question of weighting. The last line has all the force of a last line. It simply overrides the prior qualifications so that we, and Larkin, enjoy the afflatus unqualified.'

The last line has such force that it perturbs.

The first four lines of 'Wordsworth's Skates' are at a much lower level of achievement.

It's not the highest praise to claim that a poet should be achieving at approximately the same level, and in much the same way, in his recent work and in work from decades previously. This isn't artistic development. If the later is only as good as the earlier and of the same kind as the earlier, then it's disappointing. The same can't be claimed of Beethoven, who produced great works in his early period, even greater works in his second period and still greater works in his third period which were unprecedented, belonging to a different sound world and emotional world from the works of the previous periods. In 'achieving at approximately the same level,' 'approximately' means here 'very, very approximately.' The achievement in 'District and Circle' shouldn't be exaggerated.

In 'Wordsworth's Skates,' Seamus Heaney doesn't surpass the achievement of Wordsworth in his evocation of skating on Esthwaite Water, quite the opposite.

Acknowledgement gratefully made to Malene Thyssen for the photograph of The Grauballe Man. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Malene

Criticism of Seamus Heaney's 'The Grauballe Man' and other poems

Digging (Death of a Naturalist)

Death of a Naturalist (Death of a Naturalist)

Blackberry-Picking (Death of a Naturalist)

Personal Helicon (Death of a Naturalist)

Requiem for the Croppies (Door into the Dark)

The Wife's Tale (Door into the Dark)

Bogland (Door into the Dark)

Gifts of Rain (Wintering Out)

The Tollund Man (Wintering Out)

Wedding Day (Wintering Out)

Summer Home (Wintering Out)

Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication (North) 1 Sunlight

2 The Seed Cutters

Funeral Rites (North)

North (North)

The Grauballe Man (North)

Exposure (North)

The Strand at Lough Beg (Field Work)

Casualty (Field Work)

Glanmore Sonnets VIII (Field Work)

The Harvest Bow (Field Work)

Widgeon (Station Island)

Station Island VII (Station Island)

From the Land of the Unspoken (The Haw Lantern)

Clearances 7 (The Haw Lantern)

Clearances 8 (The Haw Lantern)

Wolfe Tone (The Haw Lantern)

Squaring xiii (Seeing Things)

Squaring xxxvi (Seeing Things)

St Kevin and the Blackbird (The Spirit Level)

Mycenae Lookout (The Spirit Level)

1. The Watchman's War

2. Cassandra

3. His Dawn Vision

4. The Nights

5. His Reverie of Water

District and Circle (District and Circle)

Wordsworth's Skates (District and Circle)

Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication (North)

1 Sunlight

From the Land of the Unspoken
(The Haw Lantern)

St Kevin and the Blackbird
(The Spirit Level)